Governments today face increasingly complex challenges in public service delivery, including social inequality, climate change, public health crises, and rapid digital transformation. Traditional models of public management often fall short in addressing wicked problems due to their standardized and inflexible nature. A linear and static approach remains widespread in strategic planning across both public sector and business organizations, though the limits and risks of this approach have long been discussed in the literature.
Developing a 'memory of the future' – the ability to elicit mental models and use scenario planning to prepare for change – has been viewed as a foundational capability for strategic foresight. Related work emphasizes learning processes that support organizational evolution by design, based on feedforward rather than solely feedback-driven reasoning. Recent contributions increasingly argue for framing public strategic planning and goal formation as a design process, suggesting that planning should aim not only to anticipate the future but to help create it, recognizing that organizations and their surrounding ecosystems evolve together.
This special issue focuses on how organizations – when facing dynamic and wicked problems – can design the future by fostering place-based value creation. Such an approach supports the development of shared strategic resources and enhances sustainable and place-responsive outcomes. Wicked problems are inherently place-based, shaped by local socio-economic, cultural, and environmental conditions that require context-sensitive responses. Traditional models of public management – typically centralized, linear, and standardized – frequently fail to respond effectively to such complexity. There is growing recognition of the need for dynamic, adaptive, and pluralistic frameworks that embed governance within specific local contexts and engage multiple stakeholders across levels and sectors.
Public value creation produces outcomes that enhance a community's shared, place-based strategic resources. These outcomes typically emerge from collaborative policymaking involving both public and private actors, aimed at advancing core democratic values such as equity, accountability, transparency, trust, and social cohesion. Public value creation may require critically reassessing prevailing societal norms, enabling value shifts that support sustainable, context-sensitive collective well-being. Building on recent contributions, value in public services is created within complex, nested ecosystems shaped by both spatial ('locus') and cultural/social ('habitus') dimensions of place, where locus emphasizes the significance of physical, spatial, and geographic conditions, and habitus refers to the ingrained habits, dispositions, and modes of perception that individuals develop through their social experiences. In a place, both locus and habitus are dynamically interconnected.
Place-based strategy involves designing public service interventions that are contextually grounded in the characteristics of a specific area. It requires understanding the spatial, cultural, and institutional dimensions of a context, engaging local stakeholders, leveraging place-based strategic resources, and dynamically adapting strategies to the evolving needs of the community to enhance pervasive and sustainable value creation. Strategy is no longer a top-down prescription, but rather a co-creative, iterative process sensitive to local diversity and complexity. This approach may benefit from a dual perspective on value creation, framed as the interplay between 'inside-out' and 'outside-in' strategies. The inside-out perspective emphasizes strategy design driven from within public service organizations, prioritizing internal capabilities and goals, while the outside-in perspective places emphasis on the external context – social, territorial, and institutional – in which organizations are embedded.
While both inside-out and outside-in approaches to strategy design have been explored independently in the literature, a gap remains in understanding how their integration can produce deeper insights into public service value creation. Inside-out approaches risk overlooking the complex, evolving needs of the broader ecosystem, while outside-in strategies may underappreciate the organizational capabilities and constraints that shape public service delivery. Integrating these perspectives may allow for a richer understanding of how internal strategic intent, external societal demands, and territorial attributes interact, align, or conflict – enabling the design of more context-sensitive, adaptive, and democratically grounded public services.
Adopting an outside-in orientation supports the development of collaborative platforms as facilitative mechanisms of systemic, place-based value co-creation. These platforms foster theme-focused service ecosystems – such as those dedicated to sustainable mobility, urban design, or eco-innovation – which operate as meta-governance structures that allow distributed yet coordinated decision-making. These modular ecosystems support scalable and resilient development processes even when decisions occur outside traditional institutional frameworks. The design and implementation of collaborative platforms requires a deliberate and often iterative approach to governance and orchestration.
Value is not always created in public service ecosystems; poor design or delivery can lead to value destruction – a risk particularly salient in place-based settings. Understanding the dynamics of value-in-use (benefits realized during service use), value-in-context (value shaped by local circumstances), and value-in-society (societal-level outcomes) becomes crucial. A place-based approach emphasizes how these types of value are interpreted and experienced differently across communities, reinforcing the need for adaptive, participatory performance management systems.