On July 9th, the 14th lecture of Fudan - LSE lecture series was held in Humanity Building. Stephen Osborne, Professor at the University of Edinburgh, delivered a lecture entitled “Creating Value Through Public Service Provision: Theory and Practice”. This lecture was chaired by Yijia Jing, Dean of IGPP. Scholars from Fudan University, University of Edinburgh, City University of New York, Central Police University in Taiwan, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, East China Normal University and other universities participated in the event.

Stephen Osborne is the director of the Centre for Service Optimization Research at the University of Edinburgh and president of the Institute of Public Management. He has worked on collaborative value creation in public service, public service provision design, public service innovation and public service reform. He is one of the founding editors of the journal Public Management Review and was the founding president of International Research Society for Public Management. Professor Jing also pointed out that the study of value creation in public services is an important part of public policy research. He hoped that scholars would discuss in depth the new trends in the theory and practice of value creation in public service provision.

Professor Osborne argued that existing public management theories focus only on the provision of public services but do not study it from the perspective of the people being served. Only in the context of external value creation, internal organizational performance is meaningful. Therefore, he pointed out four processes of value creation in public services, namely, the external production, the formulation and provision of cooperation, the internal consumption, and the experience and construction of cooperation. He also pointed out that the five major elements of public service value are satisfaction, outcomes, sense of experience, service capacity, and public value (social value and multiplier effect); and the three major dimensions of public service value are provision, consumption, and context.

Professor Osborne said that not all public services could create value, but all could cause harm to public values, whether it is the process of public service policy making, service delivery, or the misuse of service tools that can deal a devastating blow to the value of public services.

Prof. Chen Bin from City University of New York, Prof. Huiping Li from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and Prof. Shihong Weng from East China Normal University also gave academic presentations on the theme of value creation in public service provision, and Prof. Osborne made comments one by one.