THEME: SOCIAL INNOVATION IN PUBLIC SERVICES—INNOVATING ‘CO-CREATIVE’ RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SERVICES, CITIZENS AND COMMUNITIES?Guest editors: Sue Baines, Rob Wilson, Inga Narbutaite Aflaki, Aldona Wiktorska-Święcka, Andrea Bassi and Harri JalonenEditorial: Innovating ‘co-creative’ relationships between services, citizens and communities

Public services face growing pressure to innovate but there is little agreement how this can be achieved (Hartley, 2014). Social innovation is explicitly about addressing human needs and its place in public policy is well established (Marques et al., 2017; Sabato et al., 2017). This Public Money & Management (PMM) theme puts a spotlight on the intersection of social innovation and co-creation. Co-creation is a more recent entrant to policy agenda than social innovation but also appears to have achieved the status of an orthodoxy (Osborne et al., 2016; Torfing et al., 2019). In the context of public services, co-creation is characterized as ‘active involvement of end-users in various stages of the production process’ (Voorberg et al., 2015, p. 1335).