eGovernment experiences of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property

The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property is one of the new public management offices of the Swiss public administration. The paper shows the problems the Institute had in defining eGovernment for its own use. In particular, the fact that the Institute is acting as a representative of the Swiss government as well as an enterprise of private law made it difficult to separate between eGovernment and eBusiness. The paper describes in a first part the consequences of the concept of New Public Management (NPM) for the Institute. The second part focuses on the importance of the difference between eGovernment and eBusiness. The third part describes the roles and relations in an eGovernment transaction and introduces an institution based, a service based and a relation based view on eGovernment.