Public Management Review

Place-Based Strategy Design for Value Creation

1. Introduction and Rationale

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. Although the limits – and risks – of an “illusion of control” associated with analytical and rational planning have long been discussed (Dermer & Lucas, 1986; Otley, 2012; Wildavsky, 1973; George & Desmidt, 2016), the adoption of more robust perspectives oriented toward design, integration, and learning still appears difficult to achieve (Bianchi & Hall, 2023; George, 2025).

Developing a “memory of the future” – that is, the ability to elicit mental models and use scenario planning to prepare for change – has been viewed as a foundational capability for strategic foresight (De Geus, 1997). Related work emphasizes learning processes that support organizational evolution by design, based on feedforward rather than solely feedback-driven reasoning, and extending the focus beyond institutional boundaries (Otley, 1994; 1999, p. 369).

Building on this evolving scholarly trajectory, recent contributions increasingly argue for framing public strategic planning and goal formation as a design process (Bryson, 2021; Bryson et al., 2024). This shift suggests 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 evolution in the literature opens an avenue for examining 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, in turn, enhances sustainable and place-responsive outcomes. This perspective naturally draws attention to the spatial, cultural, and institutional specificities of places as key levers for shaping future trajectories.

Crucially, wicked problems are inherently place-based, shaped by local socio-economic, cultural, and environmental conditions that require context-sensitive responses (Ansell & Gash, 2008; Healey, 2007). Traditional models of public management – typically centralized, linear, and standardized – frequently fail to respond effectively to such complexity. In contrast, there is a 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.

This special issue aims to explore and advance the role of place-based strategy design in fostering sustainable value creation within public service ecosystems.

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. Importantly, public value creation may require critically reassessing prevailing societal norms, enabling value shifts that support sustainable, context-sensitive collective well-being.

Building on the recent contribution by Osborne et al. (2025), who argue that value in public services is created within complex, nested ecosystems shaped by both spatial ("locus") and cultural/social ("habitus") dimensions of place, this special issue seeks to establish a dialogue on how place-based strategies can be designed, governed, and evaluated to create public value. Here, habitus refers to the ingrained habits, dispositions, and modes of perception that individuals develop through their social experiences and background—deeply influencing how they engage with their environment—while locus emphasizes the significance of physical, spatial, and geographic conditions. In a place, both “locus” and “habitus” are dynamically interconnected.

This integrated perspective is increasingly applied in domains such as sustainable social innovation, underscoring the importance of aligning strategy with both socio-economic and environmental context features.

This special issue will integrate this approach with insights from the broader literature on public service logic (PSL), ecosystem thinking, dynamic performance management and governance, and collaborative platforms.

2. Key Concepts and Theoretical Foundations

2.1 Place-Based Strategy Design

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. In this perspective, strategy is no longer a top-down prescription, but rather a co-creative, iterative process sensitive to local diversity and complexity (Osborne, 2018; Dudau et al., 2023).  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, often prioritizing internal capabilities and goals (Osborne et al., 2020). In contrast, the outside-in perspective places the emphasis on the external context—social, territorial, and institutional—in which organizations are embedded (Osborne & Strokosch, 2021). From this view, strategy is not developed in isolation but emerges from dialogue within the local ecosystem, co-evolving with the needs, priorities, and capabilities of the community.

However, while both ‘inside-out’ (organizational) and ‘outside-in’ (ecosystemic) 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. When considered separately, 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 (Bianchi, 2022). 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 (Osborne et al., 2022; Rossi & Tuurnas, 2021).

2.2 Collaborative Platforms

Adopting an outside-in orientation supports the development of collaborative platforms as facilitative mechanisms of systemic, place-based value co-creation (Ansell & Gash, 2018). 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 (Torfing et al., 2024) that allow distributed yet coordinated decision-making. These modular ecosystems support scalable and resilient development processes even when decisions occur outside traditional institutional frameworks.

Bianchi & Grippi (2024) describe how these theme-focused ecosystems operate within broader place-based value creation systems, emphasizing the role of dynamic performance governance.

The design and implementation of collaborative platforms requires a deliberate and often iterative approach to governance and orchestration, as emphasized in recent work on building co-creation platforms (Ansell, Sørensen, & Torfing, 2022).

2.3 Value Creation and Destruction
As Osborne et al. (2025) note, 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.

3. Objectives and Contribution of the Special Issue

This special issue aims to:

• Advance theoretical understanding of place-based strategy design for value creation.
• Integrate organizational strategy and ecosystemic approaches for sustainable public service delivery.
• Provide empirical evidence on patterns and drivers of social innovation contributing to the formation of Public Service Ecosystems, exploring whether and how inside-out and/or outside-in approaches — separately or in combination — enable place-based public value creation in different contexts.
• Identify mechanisms for robust governance and adaptive performance management in place-based settings.
• Highlight methods and tools to facilitate learning and enhance leadership in the effort to create place-based value (e.g., collaborative platforms, modular ecosystem models) and empirical cases from different geographies.
• Address interdisciplinary challenges in bridging public administration, planning, digital governance, and social innovation.

4. Suggested Themes and Topics

We welcome both conceptual and empirical papers exploring (but not limited to) the following themes:

Strategy Design in Place-Based Ecosystems

• Frameworks for place-sensitive strategic planning in public services.
• How public value (or dis-value) emerges within complex, nested ecosystems shaped by spatial (“locus”) and cultural/social (“habitus”) dimensions of place, including their role in strategy adoption and success.
• Methods for enhancing collaborative policy design and implementation to address the inherent complexity of place-based ecosystems.
• The role of local knowledge, culture, and beliefs in shaping strategy.
• Interactions between "inside-out" (organizational) and "outside-in" (contextual) strategy perspectives, including if and how their integration may offer more comprehensive insights into value creation than when applied in isolation.
• Synergies and tensions between internal capabilities and external demands in the co-design of public service strategies.

Performance and Value in Place-Based Contexts

• Adaptive and “intelligent” performance management systems.
• Indicators and metrics for value-in-context and value-in-society.
• The role of citizen perception in evaluating public service outcomes.
• How collaborative policymaking can generate value outcomes aligned with equity, accountability, transparency, trust, and social cohesion, and support shifts toward sustainable, context-sensitive collective well-being.
• The dynamics of value destruction in public service ecosystems, including how poor service design, implementation, or governance may undermine place-based value creation and community culture, as well as strategies to prevent or mitigate such outcomes.

Co-Design and Governance Platforms

• Collaborative platforms for cross-sector governance.
• Orchestration of theme-focused ecosystems for modular place development.
• Meta-governance and boundary-spanning leadership.

Resilience, Robustness, and Learning

• Governance responses to turbulence (e.g., COVID-19 case studies).
• Building robust, place-based public services through learning-oriented systems.
• Interplay of formal/informal knowledge in ecosystem adaptation.

Technology, Platforms, and Data

• Digital platforms enabling citizen engagement and real-time data use.
• Role of AI and digital twins in place-based ecosystem visualization.
• Evaluating digital interventions for ecosystem development.

5. Methodological Diversity and Interdisciplinarity

We encourage submissions using diverse research designs, including qualitative case studies, mixed-method approaches, design science research, systems dynamics, and participatory action research. Contributions from related fields such as urban studies, planning, information systems, and sustainability science are welcome

(please contact Guest Editors for list of references)