Innovation in e-Government Initiatives: New Website Service Interfaces and Market Creation - The Taiwan Experience

The beauty of e-government initiatives goes well beyond enhancing the access to and delivery of government information and services to citizens and businesses by leveraging information technology, particularly the Internet. The Internet enables genuine service innovation in the e-government context. New Website interfaces, facilitated by Website structures which represent the relevant internal delivery systems and organizational arrangements, create new market benefits for citizens and businesses, in the form either of integrated information platforms or full online transactions. For a decade now, Taiwan has employed the Internet as an enabler to speed up public services online and has earned a top ranking worldwide for its achievements. This paper identifies Taiwan's major e-government projects, which include e-tax-filing, e-housekeeping, etc., and stakeholders in these e-initiatives, including technology providers, heads of project, IT staff, domain experts, etc. respond to semi-structured interviews. This paper applies the principles of innovation studies to the Taiwan government's use of the Internet. We propose a framework to address innovation activities in the use of technology and examine the dynamics of service innovation. This paper will contribute to innovation studies by describing the proactive potential of service innovation in e-government initiatives. In practice, the study of public sector innovation processes throws light on innovation policies across the whole economy.