Public Sector Innovation Capacity in Core Administrative Organizations: Evidence from Norway’s Brønnøysund Register Centre

Abstract

Public-sector innovation is frequently portrayed as the domain of dedicated innovation labs and experimental units, obscuring how innovation capacity can emerge within core bureaucratic institutions. This article explores how Norway’s Brønnøysund Register Centre (BRC), mainly a registry authority traditionally associated with administrative stability, has evolved into a central innovation intermediary within the country’s digital government ecosystem. Drawing on Meijer’s public innovation capacity framework, the study examines how innovation is mobilized, coordinated, tested, stabilized, and legitimized in practice. The findings show that the BRC performs key innovation functions by mobilizing and coordinating heterogeneous actors across a decentralized governance system, enabling experimentation through managed proofs-of-concept, and institutionalizing successful practices via authoritative registries, shared identifiers, and platform infrastructures. These arrangements support interoperability, data-centric service delivery, and the operationalization of once-only and life event-based service models. Trust emerges as an enabling condition that facilitates voluntary coordination, data sharing, and tolerance for experimentation, without substituting for formal governance or legal frameworks. The analysis further highlights how public-value considerations—such as data protection, identity management, accessibility, and accountability—are addressed alongside efficiency and innovation objectives. The article contributes to public-sector innovation research by demonstrating that transferability lies in functional adaptation—strengthening coordination, experimentation, and institutional foundations—rather than organizational replication.

1. Introduction

Many problems currently encountered by public administrations fall into the wicked category and demand significant resources to tackle them (Lægreid et al., 2011; Wynen et al., 2014). Public-sector innovation—especially channelled through digital transformation initiatives—has dramatically changed how the sector tries to deal with these issues as well as how information is organized, and how services are delivered and coordinated.

Such initiatives, at their core, aim to bring new ideas to the handling of societal challenges (De Vries et al., 2016). Governments frequently tend to rely on innovation labs (Gieske et al., 2016) for this, or attempt to embed the best practices of such entities into the workings of core bureaucratic institutions. Still, many of the institutional processes underlying these efforts and their functions have not yet been thoroughly analyzed.

Prior research (Bason, 2010; De Vries et al., 2016; McGann et al., 2018; Tõnurist et al., 2017; Lewis & Moultrie, 2005; Bazalgette & Craig, 2017) illustrates that innovation entities within the public sector are purposefully structured arenas for policy experimentation within larger innovation ecosystems. These structures allow governments to experiment with new digital services, regulatory frameworks, and AI-driven service delivery before full-scale deployment (Janssen & Estevez, 2013).

Across multiple best practice assessments (Arundel & Hollanders, 2011; OECD, 2024; World Bank, 2025; OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, 2023), Norway shows strong innovative public-sector transformation (OECD, 2024), enabled by near-universal digital uptake, robust infrastructure, and mature public-sector-led governance; citizens and firms widely transact online with public administration under strong connectivity and regulatory readiness. DESI (2020) reports connectivity 65.8 (93% fixed broadband take-up; 71% VHCN; 100% 4G) and human capital 65.9 (83% with at least basic digital skills); usage is high (98% internet users; online banking 97%; shopping 83%), as is business uptake (cloud 43%; SMEs selling online 26%), while public services are particularly strong (digital public services 84.9; 91% e-government users among those needing to submit forms). Internationally, Norway ranks 15th in UN EGDI (0.9315; “Very High EGDI”; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2024) and 4th in the OECD Digital Government Index (OECD, 2024). Available qualitative evaluations (Mikalef & Parmiggiani, 2022) also point towards the enabling factors that underly the success of Norway: trust-based collaboration among social partners and the public and private sectors, powerful state leadership, consortia between organizations, and task-driven focus.

This study examines Norway’s Brønnøysund Register Centre (BRC) (Brønnøysund Register Centre, 2015), a central component of the national digital government ecosystem responsible for core registries and digital platforms such as Altinn (Jansen, 2015). Using Meijer’s (2018, 2019) public innovation capacity (PIC) framework, it asks how a core administrative authority becomes an innovation intermediary within a decentralized system, and what this implies for the transferability of such capacity beyond high-performing contexts.

The BRC originated in the late 1970s, and reforms in the early 1980s aimed at addressing fragmentation, inefficiency, and poor transparency in Norway’s legal and business registries. An early milestone was the establishment of the Register of Mortgaged Movable Property in 1980–1981, one of Norway’s first digitized registries, which demonstrated the feasibility of centralized electronic recordkeeping and supported the institutionalization of standardized data practices (World Bank, 2012). These early experiences informed subsequent efforts to consolidate state data functions, leading to the creation of the Brønnøysund Register Centre (2015).

Rising demand for business registration during the 1980s further exposed the limits of a decentralized system administered by district courts, resulting in long delays and limited transparency (World Bank, 2012). In response, the government centralized business registration in Brønnøysund, separating registry functions from the courts in 1988 and establishing the Register of Business Enterprises as a single national register (Brønnøysund Register Centre, 2015). These reforms formalized the BRC’s coordinating role across administrative boundaries.

This role was strengthened through legislative measures in the 1990s, notably the establishment of the Central Coordinating Register of Legal Entities (CCR) and the Enhetsregister Act in 1995, which introduced a mandatory nine-digit organizational identifier for all entities (OECD, 2017). The unique identifier enabled systematic data exchange across government bodies, reduced duplication, and created incentives for businesses to maintain accurate information, reinforcing the BRC’s institutionalized coordinating function (World Bank, 2012).

From the early 2000s, the BRC expanded its innovation capacity through digital service integration. Following its transfer to the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 2001, BRC led the development of the Altinn portal (2003–2004), which consolidated reporting obligations from multiple authorities into a single secure interface (Mikalef & Parmiggiani, 2022; OECD, 2017). By 2010, electronic submission had become the dominant mode of business registration, further embedding the BRC as a coordinating hub within the digital government infrastructure (World Bank, 2012).

These reforms were driven by persistent challenges related to administrative backlogs, limited transparency compared to other Nordic countries, and poor data interoperability caused by inconsistent legal definitions and fragmented reporting requirements (World Bank, 2012; OECD, 2024). The CCR and Altinn directly addressed these challenges by institutionalizing standardized identifiers and shared digital infrastructures.

Throughout this process, high levels of trust and sustained stakeholder engagement supported reform implementation. The development of the CCR and Altinn involved consultations with business organizations, financial institutions, and software vendors, complemented by formal collaboration arenas such as user and coordination forums that functioned as proto-communities of practice (Wenger, 1998; Gausdal, 2008; World Bank, 2012). Together, centralization, legal standardization, stakeholder mobilization, and digital innovation positioned the BRC as a foundational platform for public-sector innovation in Norway, contributing to increased transparency, efficiency, and cross-sector trust (OECD, 2017).

The BRC’s history acts not as mere background but the sequence through which innovation capacity is built and exercised. Early milestones—authoritative registries, identifiers, and shared data foundations—constitute institutionalizing work that stabilizes infrastructure and enables later change, while shared platforms, interfaces, and standards illustrate coordination in a decentralized system where alignment cannot be imposed hierarchically. The trajectory also shows other PIC functions in action: stakeholder forums and cross-actor initiatives as mobilizing; pilots, sandboxes, and PoCs as experimenting; and recurring choices about privacy, accessibility, and sovereignty as balancing—an ongoing public-value task that shapes what can be scaled and legitimized. Together, these actions reveal path dependence: each round of stabilization and coordination expands the feasible set for subsequent experimentation and reform.

Using a qualitative case study based on in-depth interviews with BRC officials and partner organizations, this paper explores how a registry agency has become a de facto public-sector innovation ecosystem entity. It examines the implications of this change for a wider understanding of innovation in the public sector. The interview material, consisting of the meetings between the BRC and visiting researchers in late 2024, gives valuable information about the approaches and culture of the BRC, as well as the problems they faced in chasing innovation.

The present article contributes to the academic understanding of what are the attributes of a successful instance of public-sector innovation, and under which caveats these can be used by other administrations to produce similar results. Beyond documenting practices, the study reveals how the BRC has operationalized collaborative governance arrangements, embedded open innovation and design-thinking methodologies into routine work, and navigated the institutional and technical complexities of digital transformation in government. By tracing these dynamics in an agency traditionally viewed as administrative rather than innovative, the paper extends the existing public-sector innovation literature by demonstrating how innovation ecosystems can emerge organically within core bureaucratic institutions. It also shows that transferability rests on functional adaptation—enhancing coordination, experimentation, and institutional foundations—rather than organizational replication.

2. Theoretical Framework

This article employs an exploratory, single-case study design to analyze Norway’s Brønnøysund Register Centre as a public-sector innovation intermediary. The Brønnøysund Register Centre is treated as a strategically informative case due to its role in enabling cross-organizational digitalization and coordination around shared data, register infrastructures and digital service design and deployment in Norway.

The case study approach is appropriate (Eisenhardt, 1989; George & Bennett, 2005; Gerring, 2007) because the research question concerns how intermediation works in practice (Howells, 2006; Bessant & Rush 1995; Kivimaa et al., 2019)—particularly how trust among heterogeneous stakeholders enables (or constrains) collaboration, experimentation, and adoption (Ansell & Gash, 2008; Provan & Kenis, 2008; Rousseau et al., 1998)—and because the study also seeks to specify the boundary conditions under which similar arrangements might be replicated in other national contexts.

This study applies Meijer’s (2018, 2019) public innovation capacity (PIC) model as the analytical framework for interpreting how public organizations develop and realize innovation. The model conceptualizes innovation capacity not primarily as a stock of resources or formal structures, but as the extent to which a public innovation system performs a set of interdependent functions that enable new ideas to emerge and to be tested, scaled, and sustained. This approach highlights the interplay between actors, infrastructures and regulation regimes. Innovation entities are used to coordinate ministries, agencies, private firms, and users around platforms of shared data and experimental protocols.

For Meijer, these functions are evolutionary—innovation depends on generating variety, selecting among alternatives through experimentation, and retaining successful approaches through institutionalization—while also addressing distinctive public-sector demands for coordination across fragmented actors and for balancing public values.

Meijer identifies five functions: Mobilizing involves assembling actors, resources, and relationships for innovation by spanning organizational boundaries and linking public, private, and civic actors into collaborative networks. Coordinating focuses on aligning activities across organizations and government levels to avoid fragmentation, relying on brokerage, facilitation, and shared standards rather than hierarchy in decentralized settings. Experimenting refers to creating protected spaces for pilots and trial-and-error where new ideas can be tested and refined, including securing legitimacy and tolerance for learning and failure. Institutionalizing entails embedding successful innovations into durable routines, infrastructures, and standards so they can be scaled, diffused, and sustained beyond pilot phases. Balancing captures the need to manage tensions between competing public values—such as efficiency and accountability, openness and privacy, or innovation and control—while maintaining legitimacy and public trust.

The BRC is positioned as a core infrastructural actor in Norway’s digital government system, performing a hybrid role best captured as infrastructural innovation intermediation. In PIC terms, mobilizing is enacted through the convening and enrolling of actors around shared problems, coordinating is enacted through the alignment of interfaces, standards, and practices across autonomous organizations, and experimenting is enabled through lower-risk trials (e.g., PoCs/sandboxes); institutionalizing is performed through platform/data stewardship by which innovations are stabilized into registries, identifiers, and governance arrangements.

This dual description—as innovation intermediary and as platform authority/data steward—is consistent with public-sector platform governance (Janssen & Estevez, 2013; OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, 2023). Where multi-actor action is aligned without primary reliance on hierarchy, a meta-governance role (steering self-regulating networks) is also exhibited (Sørensen & Torfing, 2009), and these capacities are best understood as infrastructural power exercised through administrative infrastructures rather than direct command (Mann, 1984). Finally, privacy, accessibility, and sovereignty are integrated as public values shaping choices across the PIC functions (not only “balancing”), with trade-offs framed as value creation and legitimacy work embedded in design, governance, and scaling (Panagiotopoulos et al., 2019; Jørgensen & Bozeman, 2007).

Norway’s strong digital government record matters, but the aim is not to reduce the BRC’s success to national “high performance.” This work argues that a core registry authority—usually treated as stable administrative infrastructure—can also function as an innovation intermediary by mobilizing actors, coordinating across autonomous organizations, enabling experimentation, and institutionalizing outcomes, challenging public innovation research that locates innovation capacity mainly in peripheral units (labs, project teams, dedicated innovation offices) rather than core bureaucracy.

Using PIC to analyze the BRC and tracing the mechanisms—and breakdowns—through which its functions are performed, the attempt is to show how innovation capacity can be embedded in core administration and specify boundary conditions for transferring it beyond high-performing contexts. Given Norway’s high-capacity, digitally advanced setting, mature registry institutions, stable administrative infrastructure, and comparatively high baseline trust are treated as competing/enabling explanations alongside PIC mechanisms, rather than a single “trust explains success” story (OECD, 2017, 2024; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2024).

This study also advances PIC in three ways beyond its application to the BRC. First, it is shown that PIC functions can be enacted through core administrative infrastructure (registries, identifiers, standards), not only peripheral innovation units, with infrastructural stewardship highlighted as a key mode of coordinating and institutionalizing. Second, strong cross-functional coupling is demonstrated: mobilizing, coordinating, experimenting, and institutionalizing are often enacted as an intertwined sequence, so interactions—and breakdown points—are required to be made explicit for PIC to be most analytically useful. Third, trust is reframed as a cross-cutting mechanism and partly an outcome (“earned trust”) produced through safeguards and delivery, rather than treated as a fixed background condition.

Analytically, the PIC model enables a functional reading of the case by enabling us to ask:

How does the Brønnøysund Register Centre (BRC) build and enact public innovation capacity as an innovation intermediary in Norway’s digital government ecosystem?

How does trust shape the BRC’s ability to mobilize, experiment, institutionalize, balance, and coordinate innovation across organizational boundaries?

Which functions are strongly performed, which are weak or contested, and how do interactions among functions shape innovation trajectories?

What aspects of the BRC model are transferable to other jurisdictions as “functional equivalents,” rather than institutional copies?

By coding empirical material to these functions, the framework supports a diagnosis of how innovation capacity is built and constrained in practice, and how governance conditions (e.g., decentralization, trust, regulatory constraints) shape the feasibility of experimentation and the prospects for institutionalization.

3. Methods

3.1. Research Design

The study adopts a qualitative, interpretive single-case design focusing on the Brønnøysund Register Centre as key pillar of Norway’s digital government ecosystem. The research design is based on the qualitative interpretive design that is applied in an in-depth single-case study.

The BRC was selected through theory-guided case screening: A core administrative organization (not a peripheral innovation lab) was sought that (i) operates shared national infrastructures, (ii) must coordinate across autonomous agencies/municipalities, and (iii) is repeatedly positioned by stakeholders as a broker of cross-organizational digitalization. This was informed by a prior review of international best practices in registry and base registry development (Peristeras et al., 2023). Compared to alternative candidates that are typical within this field—innovation labs, time-limited programmes, or sectoral digital agencies—the BRC is interesting theoretically because it combines infrastructural authority and intermediation work that enables one to study which functions of PIC are carried out (and where they fail) within a stable bureaucratic organization.

This study is not an attempt at statistical generalization, but rather an attempt to draw conclusions and theoretical connections based on this specific instance (Yin, 2018). The analysis is empirical and supported by direct quotes to retain the voice of the practitioners. The quotations used are drawn from the transcriptions of the visit to Norway and are used to illustrate the main functions identified.

Interviews were conducted during a hosted research visit involving professional exchange, which can incentivize impression management and success-oriented accounts (Goffman, 2023) and heighten social desirability pressures (Krumpal, 2013). Therefore, a reflexive stance was adopted on how access conditions and positionality may have shaped respondents’ narratives (Berger, 2015; Glas, 2021). Concretely, the researchers were cognizant and probed for negative cases (resistance, stalled initiatives), compared accounts across roles/organizations, and cross-checked key claims against available documents to reduce a “success-only” inference (Berger, 2015)

The interviews were intentionally sampled to cover the full gamut of relevant perspectives, spanning (i) BRC leadership/strategy, (ii) operational and technical staff, and (iii) external partners and users across agencies/municipalities and (where relevant) private sector actors. Within each group, participants from different hierarchical levels (senior, mid-level, frontline) were included to capture both strategic intent and implementation experience.

3.2. Data Collection

The primary empirical material consists of transcripts from approximately 25 semi-structured interviews and group discussions conducted during a research visit to Norway in late 2024. The visit comprised an initial meeting in Oslo on general digital government issues, followed by a four-day on-site visit to the BRC. Prior to the visit, the research team sent an extensive set of guiding questions to the BRC based on public innovation capacity functions (Meijer, 2019). The unit responded with written answers and pointed to secondary sources which helped structure the on-site conversations and provided contextual information.

Interviewees included senior officials and subject-matter experts from the BRC and partner organizations, offering first-hand accounts of strategies, projects and challenges. The sessions combined short thematic presentations (for example, on base registries or the Altinn platform) with open-ended discussion. This allowed participants to elaborate on both factual issues and more candid reflections. In addition to the interviews, the analysis draws on policy documents and technical reports which were either provided beforehand by the BRC or were mentioned during the meetings, for example, on Nordic Smart Government, national AI strategies and digital government reforms (Nordic Innovation, 2024). These were consulted to clarify institutional and legal details and used as background for triangulation.

Each daily meeting lasted approximately 7 h, with each interview or discussion session being 90–120 min long. Participants were explicitly informed of their rights, including voluntary participation, the ability to withdraw from the study at any time and the assurance of anonymity and data confidentiality. Informed consent was secured from all participants prior to their involvement in the interviews.

The sessions were audio recorded and transcribed with automatic transcription software (Descript v.15) and then manually checked for accuracy by the research team. Confidentiality was ensured by anonymizing individual speakers and reporting findings at an aggregate level (“one interviewee”, “one participant”) in the transcripts. This enabled frank discussion while still allowing illustrative quotations to be used in the analysis.

3.3. Data Analysis

Data were analyzed using a theory-informed coding strategy. Interview transcripts and documents were coded deductively using the public innovation capacity functions proposed by Meijer (2018, 2019). Multiple codes were often applied to the same passage to reflect the interlinked nature of the identified functions. The coding was repeatedly cross-checked against the raw transcripts to ensure there was empirical support for each theme. During the visit, BRC participants and researchers responded to each other’s interpretations, thus adding an additional triangulation in the analysis. To increase reliability, parts of the coding were independently coded by multiple team members. The coding decisions from these team members were later compared and discussed, refining both individual codes and higher-order themes.

The researchers iteratively tracked whether new interviews added new codes, relationships, or mechanisms. Saturation was reached when later transcripts added no new mechanisms (PIC and “poor-fit” themes), only elaboration or negative cases. Minority views were retained regardless of frequency. Contradictory accounts were used to refine claims and boundary conditions; unresolved tensions after triangulation and document checks were reported as contested coordination or value trade-offs.

The factual claims in relation to institutional arrangements or reforms (e.g., the existence of national data catalogues, specific legal changes, etc.) were checked against official strategy documents and legislation referred to in the interviews.

Because PIC structures the main coding, there is a risk of framework-fit bias, where evidence is compressed into the five functions and cross-cutting dynamics are muted. This was addressed by pairing deductive PIC coding with an explicit check for poor fit and documenting inductive themes that did not map cleanly onto PIC—most notably, infrastructural power/dependency (e.g., leverage through identifiers/platform components), procurement/vendor constraints, legacy lock-in, and legal-risk avoidance—treating these as cross-cutting conditions and potential blind spots rather than forcing them into PIC categories (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Miles et al., 2014).

Conflicting testimonies were treated as analytic evidence rather than errors: we coded discrepancies explicitly, wrote comparison memos, and used them to identify contested interpretations and boundary conditions (Miles et al., 2014). These were then triangulated claims across interviews, roles, and available documents, and retained rival explanations until a justified interpretation could be supported (Yin, 2018; Patton, 2015).

Replicability is analyzed as “functional transfer” rather than as copying an organizational template. The study specifies which functions of innovation appear to be necessary conditions for an intermediary of this kind to operate effectively (e.g., coordination mechanisms, tolerance for managed risk, and routinised cross-boundary collaboration), and identifies where replication is likely to fail if these system properties are absent or misaligned.

3.4. Limitations

As with any single-case, interpretive study, the findings are conditioned by the particular context in which governance was conducted in Norway—characterized by a high-trust, decentralized governance system (Christensen & Lægreid, 2005)—and the context of professional exchange in which the interviews were held. The research design is based on self-reporting of officials and experts that is completed but not entirely balanced by outsiders (Alvesson, 2003). The assessments are qualitative in nature and require researcher judgement, in spite of the grounding in codified material, and are triangulated with documentary evidence (Denzin, 2012). Rather than claiming universal generalizability, the methodology is geared towards the generation of transferable knowledge: concepts, mechanisms, and functional patterns that can be leveraged in the analysis and design of public-sector innovation units in other countries on the condition that institutional and cultural differences are considered (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

4. Results

The following section presents the interview findings organized through Meijer’s public innovation capacity (PIC) framework. Instead of reporting results under thematic headings, we code the empirical evidence by function—the five capacities Meijer argues must be performed for public innovation to emerge, progress, and endure: Mobilizing, Coordinating, Experimenting, Institutionalizing, and Balancing (see Table 1).

Table 1. Main functions identified during interviews (PIC Framework).

Public Innovation Capacity Function	What the Function Captures	Connection to Empirical Material (High-Level Pointers)
Mobilizing	Building innovation capacity by convening actors/resources across boundaries (interagency, public–private, cross-border), creating the relationships needed to act	Network governance and “goodwill”; voluntary collaboration; public–private cooperation (banks, vendors, consultants); Nordic/EU collaboration; bridging with universities and EU projects
Coordinating	Aligning and orchestrating action across autonomous agencies/levels so innovation efforts connect rather than fragment	Brokerage role; difficulty coordinating “life event” services; standardization across municipalities; interoperability standards/APIs; shared platforms; need for legal agreements to enable data sharing
Experimenting	Creating protected space for pilots, proofs-of-concept, learning-by-doing, and exploration that may not immediately go into production	Learning culture and tolerance for failure; PoCs without ministry approval; pilots and event choreography testing; experimentation with linked data/decentralized IDs and emerging data sharing approaches
Institutionalizing	Turning experiments into durable routines/infrastructure that persist and scale (retention, embedding, diffusion)	“One truth for a registry,” base registries and consolidation; shift from documents to data; shared standards and national platforms (e.g., Altinn); formalizing life events/schema; feedback loops/portalization; trust-based leeway grounded in past successes
Balancing	Managing public-value tensions and legitimacy (privacy vs. sharing, efficiency vs. sovereignty, inclusion/accessibility, cross-border governance)	Trade-offs of BankID reliance; control/contingency concerns; MinID as workaround; GDPR alignment and consent-based sharing; cultural shift away from paper; universal design/accessibility requirements

This approach makes it easier to explain how the BRC enables innovation in practice: how it convenes actors and resources across boundaries; aligns autonomous stakeholders in a decentralized governance setting; creates protected space for pilots and learning; stabilizes innovations into shared infrastructure and routines; and manages the public-value trade-offs (e.g., privacy, sovereignty, inclusivity) that shape legitimacy and long-run adoption.

4.1. Mobilizing

This function captures how innovation capacity is built by mobilizing actors, resources, and relationships across organizational borders and sectors, including public–private and cross-border networks.

The BRC operates under a network governance paradigm: it gathers and connects various actors to co-produce innovations. Its success depends on building multi-trust between agencies (so that they are willing to share data and integrate services), trust between levels of government and trust between public and private sectors. The interviews reveal that the BRC is part of a network of partnerships, that catalyzes collaboration rather than enforcing it. The interagency and cross-sector collaboration is in fact very similar to the lens of collaborative governance, as the unit is not a hierarchical department, but rather a hub of a collaborative network for public innovation.

The foundation of collaboration in the centre was implicit trust across organizational borders. Unlike a traditional implementation model, the interviews revealed that most of the innovation work is carried out through horizontal networks and voluntary cooperation between agencies and sectors. In a top-down implementation model, central instruction would be the expected mode. Participants repeatedly underlined that, parallel to any national digital strategy (Norwegian Ministry of Digitalisation and Public Governance Strategy, 2024), digital integration is driven to a large extend by agencies identifying mutual needs and acting together informally. As one interviewee put it, “It wasn’t like a centralized plan … you have these needs, and you find ways to get the results you want through mutual cooperation between private and public sector.” Rather than being explicitly assigned by a ministry to innovate, innovation projects often start because a small number of key actors spot a problem or opportunity and choose to work together to solve it.

Public–private partnership is an important aspect of this function. The interviews revealed a high level of trust and collaboration between the public sector and private companies in the digital governance ecosystem in Norway. For example, the BankID system in Norway was initially developed by a group of private banks but is now used extensively for public services. This implies that the BRC does not regard the private sector as an adversary, but as an integral part of the partners in the value creation of a public good. One official remarked on this idiosyncratic model that the government’s deliberate choice was to not compete and to not replicate private sector solutions for electronic IDs, but “to work in good dialogue with the banks to bring efficient public services.” Such cooperation extends to tech vendors and consulting firms. Many of the pilots (e.g., on AI or new digital platforms) were executed “in cooperation with consulting firms”, suggesting an openness to bring in outside expertise when necessary.

The BRC spirit of collaboration extends outside Norway. The centre is engaged in cross-border collaboration and participates in broader European activities. Participants said that they have participated in the Nordic Smart Government programme (Nordic Innovation, 2024)—a cooperation between Nordic countries to allow real-time sharing of business data—and that they align with EU frameworks for data exchange. Such international collaboration activities strengthen the notion that innovation is not pursued as an activity in isolation, but within a community of practice that is not significantly restricted to organizational or national boundaries.

The interviewees discussed in detail the country’s approach to electronic identification (eID) for citizens, which is the key to secure access to digital services. Norway’s system is somewhat unusual in the world—rather than a government-created eID, Norway relies on the BankID system—a digital identity solution originally created by a group of private banks—as the first choice for citizen login to public services. This model involves deep seated public–private trust: the government trusts the private sector (banks) to do identity verification for public services and citizens use the same credentials for banking and e-government transactions.

One interviewee described the pervasiveness of this system: “The BankID is a multi-factor authentication solution … and it is something that 90% of the population use, and it is something that the private sector uses as well, although it started off as a banking solution.” From an open innovation in practice point of view, this configuration allowed the government to reuse an existing high security, instead of reinventing the wheel, and allowed the digital services to be deployed quicker. It also means that the success of many digital public services (such as filing taxes online, accessing health records, etc.) is dependent on an external system that the government does not directly own, which is an interesting and rare governance trade-off.

Learning in collaboration is also part of the culture. Frequently, interviewees spoke about cooperation with consultants, universities or being part of EU projects. This external orientation results in staff being exposed to new ideas and practices on an ongoing basis. Instead of isolating themselves, they invite outside voices which helps them avoid the “government knows best” trap. As one of the participants described, they hope to “bridge the academic world” with government practitioners, for example in AI—demonstrating, again, openness to ideas from everywhere.

4.2. Coordinating

This function captures how the unit aligns and orchestrates work across fragmented actors and levels of government (including municipalities), and how coordination is achieved in an environment that frequently exhibits weak hierarchy and mandates. An interviewee described the difficulties of coordinating even the common “life event” services: “Coordinating at the government level is not easy but it is possible … but at the municipal level, we have to coordinate by goodwill.” Here, goodwill is used to mean cooperation and trust rather than legal binding. Thus, the role of the unit is usually not top-down and controlling in nature but, rather, facilitating or brokering—bringing together the various stakeholders and helping to align them.

A networked decentralized form of governance as employed by the BRC is in part a necessity. Norway’s system of government does not provide a high level of central authority; national agencies and local authorities have a high degree of autonomy, so innovation cannot be imposed top-down. One concrete example given was that of the challenge of standardizing services across 357 independent municipalities (kommuner). The innovation team in charge of rolling out a new service goes out around the country in an association of local authorities, encouraging municipalities to share common solutions with each other, but cannot force them to adopt them. “There is an association,” said one interviewee, “that we are trying to get to coordinate with [the municipalities] but even that doesn’t have the mandate to force solutions on all municipalities.” This reinforces the soft power side of the collaborative approach—that the key to success is persuasion, showing value and sometimes peer pressure or incentives, rather than hierarchical command.

Another common theme is the emphasis of the centre on the development of a robust data-centric infrastructure as the foundation for digital innovation. The BRC officials mentioned, repeatedly, the need for robust, shared data registries, and interoperability standards that can facilitate effortless data sharing between governments. One respondent summarized the philosophy in this way: “The theory is to have one [single source of] truth for a registry.” By single point of truth, they refer to the fact that, for any fundamental data set (e.g., citizen identity, business information, property data), there should be a single authoritative source that all services access, instead of agencies maintaining their own redundant—and potentially contradictory—copy of the data. This concept is fundamental to ensure consistency, limit errors and apply the “once-only” principle—in which citizens and businesses should not be obliged to repeat the same information to different government bodies.

Interoperability was referred to as an objective, and a significant challenge. The unit has been using common standards (such as the European Core Public Service Vocabulary—CPSV, for the description of services, and standard APIs for data access), and common solutions such as the Altinn platform, which is a data exchange and digital form portal, used by many agencies. But the fragmentation that still exists was deplored by the participants. One crucial sticking point was the autonomy of the local governments in the procurement of IT systems. One interviewee described the lack of willingness of many municipalities to consider shared systems (in this case, software solutions that local authorities independently chose to deliver similar functions, such as case management systems).

This disjointed approach makes it difficult to develop a cohesive citizen experience and makes it harder to implement nation-wide innovations in a timely fashion. On this, the interviews highlighted a systemic issue behind this: If interoperability requirements are not included in procurement and funding requirements, agencies (or municipalities) may buy solutions that fit their own immediate needs in a vacuum, unknowingly creating new data silos that will prevent integration later.

Interviewees described this as a recurrent coordination failure point because municipalities and agencies retain autonomy, and systems are often bought for immediate local needs without binding interoperability requirements—“nobody says that they need to be interoperable… it’s still very, very slow progress.”

The suggestion by the participants was that this will require a significant policy change (requiring open standards and interoperability in public IT procurement) as well as appealing national shared services that local actors will want to adopt. As a result, procurement choices recreate silos that later coordination must undo. This is amplified at the municipal level, where coordination “has to [happen] by goodwill” rather than enforceable mandates, limiting uniform scaling across 357 municipalities.

The interviews also emphasized issues of data infrastructure in terms of data quality and authority—particularly the importance of having legal foundations for data sharing. One interviewee mentioned that “all top managers talk about data sharing, but without a legal structure, it’s challenging”. In addition, privacy laws and sectoral regulations may restrict or slow down the exchange of data between agencies in Norway, as in other countries. The BRC therefore also focuses, according to the interviewees, on developing those legal agreements and trust structures (e.g., specifying when one agency can use the data of another) that underlie technical interoperability. This is part of the broader data governance dynamic that the team must deal with: how to balance openness and integration with data sovereignty and privacy

Another key theme in the interviews was that, for service delivery to be truly user-focused, there is a need to particularly coordinate services around the life events and needs of citizens. The BRC interviewees reflected a philosophy of planning public services “outside-in” from the user’s (citizen’s or business’s) perspective, and not from the bureaucratic convenience perspective. This philosophy is implemented by the notion of life event-driven services—in other words, packaging and sequencing services that an individual may require when a certain life event takes place—the birth of a child, losing a job, moving to a new city, facing a death in the family. The idea is that, rather than the users having to visit a number of agencies in person, the government is able to proactively or at least seamlessly deliver a package of related services triggered by that event.

One issue identified was the formalization of life events and bringing all parts of government to an agreement on what those events are—in effect, a standardization issue (for example, one agency’s definition of “business start-up” event may differ from an-other’s). This ties back to a frequent discussion of interoperability and semantic alignment. This user-centric, event-driven vision has the innovation unit not only building services, but also building common vocabularies and models of public service delivery in order to do so.

4.3. Experimenting

This function describes the existence of protected spaces for piloting, proofs-of-concept, and learning-by-doing, including testing emerging technologies and new service models before they are institutionalized. On this, numerous interviewees commented on the importance of the organizational culture and working style of the BRC, which highly values learning, experimentation and tolerance for failure. This internal culture is one of the key factors that, according to the participants, allows the unit to serve as a public-sector innovation entity in practice and is in contrast with the expected risk-averse culture of typical government agencies.

One of the senior members of the BRC team explained their philosophy: “One of our major ambitions is that we want to be constantly learning as we go. It is important for a little bit of time for everyone in the organization to learn and experiment, and it is great for all of us in the long run”. This statement encapsulates a conscious process to make continuous learning a part of everyone’s job. This means that staff are encouraged to dedicate some of their time to researching new technologies (e.g., AI or blockchain), undergoing training, or experimenting with new ideas, regardless of whether these areas have an immediate connection to the centre’s deliverables. The emphasis on being “beneficial in the long term” signifies the leadership’s realization that an innovation capability is built through investing in the skill sets of people and allowing them to have the freedom to roam instead of everyone working narrowly on pre-defined tasks.

The BRC team has also been given flexibility in the structure to pursue pilot projects. One quote that stood out was in the context of how far they can go with experimenting with new ideas: “We are allowed to research something and do a proof of concept, even though it is not going to go into production for sure … because we learn a lot from the proof of concepts and it helps us in the development phase” … “we don’t have to ask the ministry to do that—we just do it.” In fact, the team appears to internalize the fact that risk is not only tolerated, but failure is anticipated as part of the process of innovation. One participant described the philosophy of government innovation labs in general: “People do invest in them and they do know that they will fail.” “And they will fail repeatedly, but at the end, you will have something very worthwhile”.

The officials acknowledged that freedom is possible because of trust from political superiors. The BRC (and its online operations) had delivered successful solutions in the past (for example the Altinn platform is widely regarded as a success story). As one participant commented, “our agency has proven in the past that they can come up with good solutions that are very beneficial.” “So the leadership of the political world trusts us to bring forth something”. “So we’re allowed to learn and experiment in the course of doing that.” It must be noted that interviewees were somewhat vague about the in-house process for deciding when to stop, continue, or institutionalize a pilot, but they pointed to recurring considerations: clear demand from multiple actors, a workable legal basis for data use, acceptable security/operational risk, and a committed “owner” with funding for long-term upkeep.

This is a virtuous cycle, in that initial successes resulted in a reservoir of trust with the ministry and parliament, which in turn resulted in more room (and presumably funding) for the innovation unit to try new things, which can result in more successes. It also shows the importance of credibility being established for an innovation unit—if they were seen as just “playing with technology” and not producing anything that was useful, then that trust could even disappear. In the case of Norway, the unit has acquired so much reputation that the overseeing bodies give it much more leeway and do not turn a micromanagement wheel on its project portfolio.

Some of this is aspirational and in the process of being developed, the interviewees noted. “We utilize events that portray changes in a person’s life … triggering services that matter for the person … we choreograph those based on what the citizen really needs,” said one of the officials, suggesting that pilot implementations exist (possibly in limited domains) where event choreography is tested. The term is instructive—it suggests a choreography of systems and agencies working in the background in concert with a central logic (the life event) to deliver a seamless experience to the user. For example, in the case of a death event, the system may notify the appropriate offices (pension, tax, health, property registry) so that the heirs do not have to go to them separately, a general procedure for handling formalities after a death has been recorded.

Another area of exploration for the BRC team looks to the future of interoperability commitments. They discussed research into linked data and decentralized architectures as the next level of integration. One participant commented on the influence of EU efforts: “We are seeing the impact of EU efforts around linked data and open standards and decentralized IDs…we are experimenting with this because we feel it may help us to solve some of our current issues.” The BRC tries to bridge existing gaps in interoperability but is also experimenting with state-of-the-art technologies like semantic web (linked data) and self-sovereign identities (decentralized ID) in anticipation of the future. The use of the terms data spaces and IoT integration in the transcripts (particularly smart cities) reflects a willingness for innovation in the way data is shared, not only within government but across sectors and borders.

4.4. Institutionalizing

This function captures how innovations are retained, stabilized, and scaled into durable routines and infrastructures—e.g., registries, standards, platforms, and widespread adoption. In practice, some of these base registries are directly controlled by the BRC itself—for example, the Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities and related databases. The interviews revealed that the movement towards consolidating and interlinking registries has been a long and winding road. One official said efforts were being made to develop some sort of “registry of registries” or metadata catalog, as a step toward achieving better integration.

Participants also talked about an evolution of the mindset: from seeing their role as working with documents and forms, to working with structured data. An interviewee stressed the importance of registries to move to a paperless hospital, from a document paradigm to a 100% data-centric paradigm. This indicates an intentional move away from paper and even digital (PDF, etc.) documents and instead working directly with data objects. For instance, instead of the citizen uploading a scanned birth certificate as proof of child’s birth to various agencies, the relevant data (birth record of the child) should be available in a base registry and should be query-able as necessary by authorized systems—no PDFs, no scans, just data pulled via APIs. This observation is indicative of the BRC’s contribution to the development of an integrated digital government—single-source registries, common data standards, and bridging disparate systems. It highlights achievements (e.g., the existence of major registries) as well as hurdles (legacy systems, independent local solutions creating friction) of national APIs.

One interviewee provided a strong sense of the need for flexibility in service delivery: “The user-centred approach means that you cannot package these services in a line… each person’s journey is unique, so the services need to be flexible to accommodate this”. This quote stresses the importance of acknowledging that the standard linear and agency-focused processes used to address the situation are not informed by the variability in individual circumstances. To make this work a reality, the team is working to formalize life events. They described the challenge in the following way: “A life event must be described in a formal way. And we haven’t got a formal way of doing this yet”. They offered that there is merit in standardizing definitions of possibly using some kind of schema like the Core Public Service Vocabulary (CPSV) extended to life events. By formalizing, they suggest they can create a programmatic link between events and services, which is the backbone of event-driven service delivery.

Participants provided some examples to explain this vision. A typical one was as follows: “If a person loses his/her job, that should automatically trigger a chain of support services.” In the present circumstances, the loss of one’s job may involve individual applications for unemployment benefits, changes in health insurance, job-seeking services, etc.” According to the participants, in an event-driven model, the system would detect the event (job termination) and then proactively offer or implement the appropriate services for the person—for example, pre-enrol him or her in unemployment benefits, send information about job training programmes, etc.—without the person having to figure it out. The BRC team has planned to apply such trigger mechanisms: When data in a register indicates a change in status (e.g., an end-of-employment notice is submitted by an employer), this could be a trigger that initiates a series of actions in different systems.

The user-centric theme is also embodied in the method of the feedback loops with the users themselves—for example, via the Altinn portal, users can see the status of their applications (and even ask questions), which gives a level of transparency and control to the user. The single government portal approach (Altinn) was also addressed with citizens and businesses having “a single portal to seek information about services”, “a single portal to request more information on the status of their application.” These aspects suggest that the designers took into account the need for user clarity, the anxiety that accompanies the lack of understanding of what is happening in a bureaucratic process—offering a window into the process and the opportunity to interact. Participants described this as similar to tracking an online postal package.

Institutionalizing should not be thought of as a terminal condition, but as a sustainable accomplishment. In this context, registries, identifiers, and shared platforms offer the scaffolding needed to coordinate, but, at the same time, they also present opportunities for failure: The reliance on legacy parts might limit the scope for change and increase the costs of integration; the choice of technologies can create lock-in that prevents future change; and the lifespan of these systems depends on continued political attention, legal maintenance, and stable funding. With these frailties, institutionalizing amounts to continuous labour—perpetually defending, updating, re-legitimizing infrastructures—rather than a one-off feat.

4.5. Balancing

This function captures how public innovation capacity depends on managing dynamics, trade-offs and tensions (e.g., efficiency vs. sovereignty, openness vs. privacy, inclusion vs. standardization), and on sustaining legitimacy and trust. One important example of such a dynamic underlies the use of the bank-supplied eID system. While the use statistics suggest that there is great confidence in this system, the interviewees also felt that risks and control aspects need to be considered. As one participant said, “While it has been convenient to leave this responsibility to the banks, it does prompt questions of how much control we have.” This is a sign that private infrastructure for something as vital as citizen identity can be a vulnerability—if the banks were to change terms, for instance, or there were significant security breaches, then the government would have to have contingency plans. It is a trade-off between efficiency (using an existing system) and sovereignty (making sure that the state can fulfil its duties to its citizens). To work around these issues and provide access to all citizens, Norway has also implemented a state-issued eID (“MinID”).

Data privacy and sovereignty also become part of the trust dynamic. The BRC experts frequently mentioned that citizens must have faith in the way their data is used in these integrated systems. For instance, with respect to a centralized people register (containing personal data) one interviewee stated the following: “We try to ensure that the data is protected, especially across borders.” Norway is not a member of the EU but “generally follows EU data protection standards (GDPR) and is in the cross-border exchange of data among the countries of the European Economic Area—so it is important to ensure that personal data does not flow unchecked or without permission”. Participants also referred to consent-based data sharing as a concept which is being promoted (for instance, in the context of real-time business data sharing, ensuring businesses consent to data pulled by tax authorities).

BankID implementation and cross-border data protection illustrate strained, conditional trust that is renegotiated under uncertainty. BankID is valued for speed and scale, but “control” concerns intensify if vendor terms shift or breaches occur; cross-border data reuse is likewise bounded by sovereignty and privacy expectations.

In such cases, legitimacy work takes a repair role: sustaining MinID and contingency plans, and making data sharing acceptable through tighter access rules, auditability, and explicit legal/consent arrangements. Authority for this is distributed. Political actors set acceptable dependencies, agencies negotiate specific flows via legal/data governance, while the BRC brokers and stewards cross them.

A second recurring bottleneck was described as legal rather than technical: Attempts to reuse data across agencies can stall the moment actors must authorize specific information flows. Interviewees summarized this as a gap between strategic rhetoric and operational decision-making. In practice, the coordination dispute is resolved or deferred through legal agreements that specify who may use which datasets for what purposes, and under what safeguards, before broader scaling is considered.

Another interviewee did mention a relevant cultural balancing point: “We need the digital representation … to validate [information] without asking for additional certificates.” This is the move away from paper certificates and towards relying on digital representations. In many countries, the public has more faith in a stamped paper than a digital record—Norway is trying to shift this culture by ensuring that digital data—if appropriately governed—is equally reliable. Data sovereignty in this context requires that citizens and the nation state maintain control over personal data and not be required to prove themselves in some traditional way every time or use a foreign platform.

The Norwegian experience in this regard seems particularly notable to the researchers, as the public and private sector or citizen trust in many countries is more volatile, and, as it was pointed out by the interviewees: “Trust between public and private sectors is particularly fragile in [some countries]” but is “such an enabler for such innovation in Norway”. Thus, the role which the BRC plays here as a PSI unit is to be a trust broker—to create secure systems and partnerships which citizens can use comfortably and which in turn would facilitate digital innovation. Also, interviewees were often not specific about the internal processes through which public-value conflicts (e.g., privacy, sovereignty, accessibility) are negotiated, which limits how far we can reconstruct concrete episodes of disagreement, delay, and compromise from the current material. This is therefore treated as a boundary of the present analysis and as a priority for further research, ideally through closer observation of decision forums and longitudinal tracing of contested cases.

Another balancing aspect involves user-centric design is to make services inclusive and accessible to all users, including those with disabilities or low levels of digital literacy. The BRC group emphasized the need to follow universal design and accessibility criteria. One participant commented, “Universal design standards are necessary … having all services be universal design compliant is an independent element of our work.” In Norway, like other countries, there are legal requirements for public websites and digital services to be accessible (e.g., WCAGs), and, as part of the user-centric ethos, the unit monitors and assists agencies to meet the requirements. One official reiterated this commitment by saying, “We need to deliver digital solutions that are accessible to all in order to ensure inclusivity across our systems.”

Interviewees addressed trade-offs by describing them as practical design and governance choices rather than abstract principles: “When efficiency gains pushed toward broader data reuse and seamless services, privacy concerns triggered stricter access rules, additional safeguards (e.g., logging/controls), or delays until a clearer legal basis was in place; when convenience relied on external solutions (e.g., widely used bank-sourced eID), sovereignty concerns were raised as a cost of speed and scale, prompting mitigation efforts (e.g., strengthening public alternatives).

Even in this “successful” case (the BRC), tensions and shortfalls were reported. Municipal coordination was described as reliant on “goodwill,” limiting soft steering, and interoperability was said to be “very, very slow” when procurement does not mandate it. Data sharing was also constrained by unclear legal foundations (“without a legal structure, it’s challenging”), narrowing what can be scaled. On the innovation side, PoCs were valued even when they “do not deploy,” key building blocks remained incomplete (e.g., “life events” not yet formally defined), and institutionalizing continued to face friction from legacy and local systems.

5. Discussion

In contrast to traditional bureaucratic models in which digital services are developed according to top-down, linear processes, the approach at Brønnøysund seems more in line with experimental governance paradigms (Szyszczak, 2006), and can support continuous learning, adaptation and feedback along the wider digital government system (Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013).

Beyond confirming PIC, the BRC case offers three conceptual insights for public-sector innovation theory. It identifies infrastructural bureaucratic innovation: Such capacity can be embedded in core administrative infrastructure (registries, identifiers, standards), not only in peripheral labs or project units. It also conceptualizes infrastructural intermediation as a hybrid of brokerage and durable levers (standard-setting, platform stewardship), which changes how coordination and scaling occur in decentralized systems. Finally, it treats trust as partly endogenous to innovation capacity—simultaneously a resource and an outcome—showing how repeated delivery and safeguards can generate “earned trust” that then enables further experimentation and coordination.

5.1. Replicable Aspects

The BRC model demonstrates that public-sector innovation is not limited to digital tools but involves a holistic realignment of mission, partnerships, and user engagement. This following discussion synthesizes core research findings to present both the replicable elements of the BRC model and the challenges that other countries are likely to encounter when attempting similar reforms. Six core replicable aspects are identified and mapped to PIC functions, as illustrated in Table 2.

Table 2. Replicable aspects of BRC functions.

Replicable Aspect	Key Points	PIC Function(s) Mapping
Trust and Transparency	Robust data protection, open communication, accountability, citizen confidence.	Balancing; Mobilizing
Collaborative Governance and Funding	Multi-stakeholder governance, joint funding, breaking silos, accountability.	Mobilizing; Coordinating
Enabling Legal Frameworks	Technology-neutral laws, once-only principle, supportive legislation, legal certainty.	Institutionalizing; Coordinating; Balancing
Openness to Experimentation	Labs mentality, regulatory sandboxes, trial-and-error culture, iterative learning.	Experimenting; Balancing
Stakeholder Engagement and Co-Creation	User forums, citizen/business involvement, shared vision, trust building.	Mobilizing; Coordinating; Balancing
Centralized Digital Infrastructure	Once-only principle, unique organization numbers, integrated registries, efficiency.	Institutionalizing; Coordinating

To explain the transferability of digital transformation initiatives, it is essential to distinguish context-dependent enabling conditions from generalizable mechanisms. In the BRC case, enabling conditions—elevated institutional trust, strong administrative capacity, and mature registry infrastructures—reduce political and transactional friction but are difficult to replicate across settings. The mechanisms are more portable: brokerage that aligns and translates across organizations (Mobilizing); orchestration through standards and shared infrastructure (Coordinating); protected experimentation via sandboxes or proofs-of-concept that reduce risk and circulate learning (Experimenting); and the routinization of successful pilots into governance, funding streams, and technical architectures (Institutionalizing), complemented by explicit public-value adjudication (Balancing). Even so, these mechanisms presuppose functional equivalents in lower-trust or lower-capacity environments—credible safeguards, enforceable standards or procurement levers, and baseline implementation competence—otherwise, coordination and scaling will stall even if the form is copied.

5.1.1. The Foundational Role of Trust and Transparency

It becomes clear from the interviews that perhaps the guiding factor and main thread in the BRC’s model is its emphasis on trust and openness. Robust technical solutions are a necessity but not enough on their own for strengthening citizens’ trust. They need to be attached to practices that are able to ensure citizen confidence (Sleire, 2024). The BRC has gained considerable legitimacy by implementing transparent processes, adopting robust data protection practices and maintaining open lines of communication with citizens and collaborators. Empirical research on trust in digital government activities has repeatedly found that high trust ranks as a most important requirement for success, as stakeholders are more motivated to engage with and share data with systems that are reliably and securely built (Siverbo et al., 2024; Esayas & Hauglid, 2024). This focus on openness and accountability creates the fertile soil for innovation and points to a clear replicable function for other countries sharing similar democratic traditions (Ruijer & Meijer, 2020).

In PIC terms, trust and transparency are not just contextual factors; they operate as key Balancing mechanisms. They help moderate the public-value tensions that can otherwise delegitimize digital innovation (e.g., accountability, data protection, control, openness). At the same time, trust is also a Mobilizing mechanism. It increases willingness among stakeholders to participate, share data, and accept new arrangements. This is important, since PIC notes that innovations will not progress if actors refuse to engage or if legitimacy is challenged.

Thus “trust” is revealed as a multi-level construct: (1) inter-organizational trust (willingness of agencies/municipalities to share data and align practices), (2) institutional trust in the BRC as a competent and procedurally fair steward (neutrality, reliability), and (3) political/oversight trust (tolerance for experimentation and delegated discretion). Analytically, trust operates primarily as a cross-cutting mechanism that lowers the transaction costs of coordination and enables protected experimentation, but it is also partly an outcome: Repeated delivery and transparent safeguards can accumulate “earned trust” over time, forming a virtuous cycle.

Importantly, “earned trust” is not a stock that—once accumulated—remains stable. Interviewees’ accounts imply a recurring cycle in which trust is built through delivery and safeguards, then tested when initiatives introduce new dependencies or raise uncertainty (e.g., reliance on bank-supplied eID, or broader cross-agency data reuse), and then maintained or repaired through visible accountability measures (contingency planning, auditability/logging, and legal clarification before scaling). This helps explain why legitimacy work is most salient at moments of controversy or perceived failure: such moments trigger demands that innovation be translated into enforceable safeguards rather than remaining goodwill-based.

5.1.2. Collaborative Governance

A key principle for the success of the BRC is its model of multi-stakeholder governance. This brings together different government agencies and ministries with private sector partners to deliver cross-cutting digital services. The literature suggests that cooperative leadership and secure funding jointly promote inter-organizational collaboration and provide top leadership policy support for digital reform (Frazier, 2014). This whole-of-government approach helps cut across traditional siloes and helps willing stakeholders at both the local and central level remain active in helping to shape and sustain digital initiatives (Christensen & Lægreid, 2007). This also helps the consolidation and pooling of funding resources if needed. This, in turn, increases accountability and dedication among stakeholders. This is an attractive governance model that could be replicated in other countries that wish to make interconnected digital platforms their public sector (Meyerhoff Nielsen & Jordanoski, 2020).

Such multi-stakeholder governance and funding arrangements directly strengthen Mobilizing, by bringing actors and resources into an innovation network, and Coordinating (aligning priorities, responsibilities, and interdependencies across agencies and levels). Where hierarchy is limited or costly to use, coordination often depends on governance designs that connect actors through shared commitments and resource flows. This help ensure that experimentation will not stall if central coordination is weak.

5.1.3. Enabling Legal Frameworks

Robust legal frameworks support the performance of the BRC and help provide an environment for successful operations with sufficient security and predictability of the governing rules. Norway has implemented relevant legal reforms that have made the “once-only” principle institutional, in that unique organization numbers are introduced and norms for the transfer of information are defined (Esayas & Hauglid, 2024). Evidence shows that laws which are technology-neutral and updated frequently to remove regulatory barriers can produce an enabling environment for digital innovation without unduly inhibiting service provision (Blind, 2012). Such agile, future-oriented legal instruments not only clarify the expectations for both public and private actors, but also promote constant improvement by giving them a legal certainty required to produce long-term investments on digital infrastructure.

These legal frameworks are an enabling condition for Institutionalizing because they stabilize innovations into durable rules, roles, and data sharing norms. They also contribute to Coordinating by clarifying interoperability obligations, permissible information flows, and predictable governance rules across organizations. Finally, they add to Balancing by managing dynamics around control, rights, and legitimacy—creating a legally credible basis for innovation that might otherwise be contested.

5.1.4. Ability to Take Risks and Try New Things

The BRC model is characterized by a high willingness to experiment, through the institutionalization of processes to engage in projects that are high-risk but innovative. Successful digital transformations need environments where trial-and-error, iterative learning and scaling of promising initiatives are possible (Edmondson, 1999; Mergel, 2016; Mergel et al., 2019). The BRC has initiated internal innovation labs and regulatory sandboxes to allow emerging technologies to be tested under managed conditions, assess outcomes and learn best practices, to differentiate disruptive technologies and avoid any system-wide impact. Creating these safe spaces for trial-and-error is a necessary condition for iterative improvement and can be used as a model for public administrations in other countries that want to create a culture of continued innovation (McGann et al., 2018; Radosevic et al., 2023).

Such latitude is very rare in the public sector (Bozeman & Kingsley, 1998; Torugsa & Arundel, 2017; Ritchie, 2014; Deligiannis & Peristeras, 2025). BRC practices highlight that the unit has an agreement (or at least an appreciation with oversight agencies) allowing for small-scale experiments within their own systems and without the need to get every single one of them approved at the ministerial level. This agility is akin to a technology laboratory or start-up environment in government (Tõnurist et al., 2017; Nair & Howlett, 2016). By performing proofs-of-concept (PoCs), they can test emerging technologies or new ideas for services at a low cost and within a short time-frame, and learn from them, either abandoning them or iterating them. In other words, the value of learning is explicitly considered to be an adequate return on investment for these efforts, even if the specific concept tested does not deploy. Such an environment is distinctive when compared with more narrow bureaucracies. There is a great deal of space for experimentation that, in other organizations, would be very hard to justify in terms of budget for proofs-of-concept that may not end up in production (Borins, 2001, 2014; Hinterleitner, 2023).

This point maps most closely to Experimenting, which in PIC concerns the protected space for trial-and-error, learning, and the exploration of uncertain technologies. At the same time, the reference to managed conditions and avoiding system-wide impact connects to Balancing: Experimentation in government must manage risk, accountability pressures, and legitimacy. In PIC terms, sandboxes and labs do not only enable novelty—they are governance devices that allow experimentation without triggering unacceptable public-value failures.

5.1.5. Stakeholder Participation and Co-Creation

Stakeholder participation through co-creation activities is an important element of the BRC’s digital transformation program. The centre systematically engages with public authorities, business associations, banks, software vendors and citizens through dialogue and collaborative design forums to ensure digital services are technically robust and, crucially, user-centric (Voorberg et al., 2015). Specific issue-oriented permanent working groups, such as the User Forum for Electronic Services, allow multi-stakeholder dialogue on legal, technical and usability issues, helping produce a common vision and a joint sense of responsibility (Ansell & Gash, 2008; Siverbo et al., 2024). This participatory approach to co-creation has led to digital services that fit better with their users’ needs, as well as to strong mutual trust of all involved—both conclusions with general global relevance for digital reforms (Linders, 2012; Fledderus et al., 2014, Voorberg et al., 2015).

Participation and co-creation strengthen Mobilizing by enrolling a broader set of actors (banks, vendors, business associations, citizens) into the innovation process. They also strengthen Coordinating by producing shared problem definitions and instilling a sense of common vision, which reduces fragmentation and conflict during implementation. Co-creation also contributes to Balancing by improving legitimacy, usability, and fairness—making digital reforms more defensible and socially acceptable, especially when they require data sharing and cross-sector reliance.

5.1.6. Centralized Digital Infrastructure

One of the most unique aspects of the BRC is its technology-focused centralized digital infrastructure that unifies disparate registries into a single source of authority. Centralized registries make information sharing much easier, avoid the duplication of efforts and implement the once-only principle, according to which citizens and companies provide their data to the government once (Dawes, 1996; Janssen, & Estevez, 2013). The concept of using a unique organization number as a common identifier makes processes in fragmented administrative systems much easier and improves the quality and efficiency of the services (Bottega & Powell, 2012; Wojtkiewicz, 2025). International references also confirm that a centralized electronic infrastructure, such as Estonia’s X-Road, or Denmark’s integrated core registries, are important prerequisites for reaching interoperability and for ensuring that public services are offered as uniform one-stop shops.

This point maps most directly to Institutionalizing, because centralized registries, unique identifiers, and the adherence to the once-only principle represent “retention” mechanisms: They embed innovation into durable technical and administrative infrastructures that can be reused and scaled. It also supports Coordinating by providing shared reference points (authoritative registries) and interoperability prerequisites that align multiple agencies. In PIC terms, infrastructure is not only “technology”—it is a means of institutionalizing coordination and enabling continuous innovation on top of stable foundations.

Considered together, these six elements indicate that the BRC case aligns closely with many of Meijer’s PIC functions. Trust, transparency, and co-creation provide Balancing and Mobilizing capacity; collaborative governance and shared funding provide Mobilizing and Coordinating capacity; sandboxes and labs strengthen Experimenting capacity under public-sector constraints; and legal frameworks plus centralized registries/infrastructure strengthen Institutionalizing capacity by stabilizing and scaling reforms into durable foundations. In this reading, the BRC’s distinctiveness does not rest on a single best practice, but on a configuration that may be replicated elsewhere. In such an instance, care must be taken so that these functions mutually reinforce one another—particularly how legitimacy-building (Balancing) enables participation (Mobilizing), facilitating cross-agency integration (Coordinating) and creating the conditions for safe experimentation and large-scale institutionalization.

5.2. Challenges to Replicability in Other Nations

Implementation of the paradigm in other jurisdictions or domains is not without challenges. Other countries seeking to replicate such models must navigate a range of issues that arise from differences in institutional, cultural, and technical contexts. The following six themes can be read as constraints and enablers affecting such efforts (see Table 3).

Table 3. Replicability challenges of BRC functions.

Replicability Challenge	Relevant PIC Function(s)
Cultural and Organizational Resistance.	Mobilizing (primary); Institutionalizing (secondary)
Small IT Capacity and Expertise.	Mobilizing (skills/resources); Institutionalizing (operational capacity)
Maintaining the Momentum and Financing.	Institutionalizing (primary)
Regulatory and Legal obstacles.	Coordinating (primary); Experimenting (via sandboxes); Balancing (public-value constraints)
Privacy and Security Issues.	Balancing (primary); Coordinating (cross-system trust implications)
Interoperability and Outdated Systems.	Coordinating (primary); Institutionalizing (infrastructure embedding)

Through the PIC lens, the challenges identified in the study map onto pressures on each core function. Mobilizing is constrained by cultural resistance and limited IT capacity, highlighting the need for organizational change, sustained training, and the ability to attract or supplement public-sector skills. Coordinating is primarily challenged by regulatory fragmentation and legacy systems, where siloed legal frameworks and technical heterogeneity impede data sharing, interoperability, and the establishment of common identifiers. Experimenting emerges as a governance mechanism for addressing these constraints, particularly through regulatory sandboxes and pilot projects that allow legal and institutional arrangements to be tested in controlled settings. Institutionalizing is threatened by short-termism in funding, political support, and capacity, underscoring the long-term nature of digital identity reforms and the need for stable financing, durable institutions, and sustained technical expertise. Balancing is most visible in privacy and security concerns, where legitimacy depends not only on technical safeguards but also on transparent communication to maintain public trust.

5.2.1. Cultural and Organizational Resistance

The potential cultural and organizational resistance is one of the key obstacles to the implementation of a BRC-type project. The transition of old and siloed paper-based processes towards new digital integrated model needs a considerable change in organizational behaviour and mentality (Konstantinidis et al., 2024; Mergel et al., 2020; Irani et al., 2023; Wilson & Mergel, 2022). Scepticism and aversion towards the adoption of centralized digital reforms can be the outcome of bureaucratic processes and traditions of local control which are well learnt in a variety of contexts. Breaking these barriers needs powerful change management policies that comprise extensive communication of the advantages, ongoing training of the employees, and implementation steps in phases that would permit gradual adjustment (Kuipers et al., 2014; Wilson & Mergel, 2022).

5.2.2. Weak IT Capacity and Expertise

Establishment and operation of the complicated digital registries demand the presence of high technical skill and information and communication technology (IT) infrastructure. Norway, a pioneer in innovative development (Fagerberg et al., 2009a, 2009b; Sogner, 2007), is a significantly more mature environment than many jurisdictions. The difficulties of the insufficiency of IT capacity, insufficient skills availability and insufficient specialization may be more significant in countries with a lower degree of digital advancement (Wimmer et al., 2020; Meyerhoff Nielsen & Jordanoski, 2020). To establish a similar system, governments will require a significant amount of financial resources to develop its workforce, including hiring and training IT professionals and data managers, and must address the initial deficit of competencies by outsourcing the employment of external experts and technological companies (Wimmer et al., 2020).

5.2.3. Maintaining the Momentum and Financing

Digital government reforms are long-term initiatives, which may frequently transcend multiple electoral cycles and several administrations, making it hard to guarantee maintaining the political initiative and the requisite funding (Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013; Gil-Garcia et al., 2018). The steady, decades-long evolution of the BRC signifies the necessity to reach long-term politics buy-in and establish funding schemes that are not based on fleeting budgets. This can be achieved through institutional solutions that are permanent, special digital innovation agencies and policies to ensure strategic projects are not affected by political changes and electoral cycles (Wimmer et al., 2020).

5.2.4. Regulatory and Legal Obstacles

Legacy or overly restrictive legal frameworks may significantly affect the process of replicating digital government reforms. To some extent, the success of Norway was enabled by active legislation change (e.g., enforcing the once-only principle), which provided a clear legal framework of data sharing and of digital transactions (Janssen & Estevez, 2013; Klievink et al., 2016; Wimmer et al., 2020). Maintaining requirements that demand physical interaction (e.g., paper-based process, verifying a person in-person) or others that limit the flow of data across agencies may cripple similar efforts. These considerations can be tackled by revising and making existing regulations digital-ready (Plesner & Justesen, 2022; Oliveira et al., 2024) to remove any impediments to digital innovation. This can be assisted by employing regulatory sandboxes and pilot projects that aim to test new law in a regulated environment (Allen, 2025; Ranchordas & Vinci, 2024).

5.2.5. Privacy and Security Issues

Whereas the BRC has already been successful in building trust through taking robust data protection and security measures, countries with lower levels of trust among citizens or where cyber infrastructures are not developed enough may find this is a significantly difficult task. It is important that digital reforms do not lead to personal privacy invasion or leave systems vulnerable to cyber threats. This is not only related to technical aspects where it is necessary to develop secure systems. It also signifies the way data protection practices are communicated to people in a transparent manner—something evident in best-case examples like Estonia (Kattel & Mergel, 2019).

5.2.6. Interoperability and Legacy Systems

The integration of the new digital infrastructure with legacy systems is one of the technical challenges which other countries should anticipate. The establishment of standard identifiers (e.g., unique number of organization) and interoperability models which are allowed to freely exchange information between various government agencies was a great benefit of the BRC model (Irani et al., 2023) but might prove difficult in other jurisdictions (Janssen & Estevez, 2013; Kubicek et al., 2011). Additionally, in instances where non-interoperable IT systems and data standards are almost absent, it can be a daunting task to develop standards that permit the integration of systems. In many cases, this will require significant financial resources, as well as organizational restructuring (Irani et al., 2023; Kubicek et al., 2011).

The above help form a cautious argument about which mechanisms appear portable (e.g., brokerage, protected experimentation, standard-setting/orchestration) and which depend heavily on context conditions (e.g., administrative capacity, legal continuity, stable resourcing, and baseline trust). Transfer claims must be bound to settings that can supply functional equivalents—especially legal and procurement levers, minimum implementation capacity, and credible safeguards—otherwise, similar approaches are likely to stall even if the organizational form is copied.

Table 4 lists concrete elements of the BRC approach that are unlikely to transfer “as-is” to lower-trust or more centralized systems, and what functional substitutes would be needed instead.

Table 4. Elements of the BRC approach with limited transferability across administrative contexts.

Possible Limited Transfer	Reason	Possible Alternative
Voluntary, “goodwill” coordination	Low trust or strong hierarchy changes how actors comply	Mandates/incentives + enforceable standards/procurement
Easy space for PoCs/sandboxes	Audit/political risk makes failure costly	Protected funding + clear risk rules + oversight support
Trust-based data sharing	Low trust increases reluctance and risk concerns	Strong legal basis + safeguards + accountability/oversight
Fast scaling from registries/identifiers	Requires mature, high-quality base registries	Investment in registries + common IDs + interoperability basics
Informal handling of value trade-offs	Centralized/low-trust systems demand formal processes	Formal forums + impact assessments + clear decision rules

The BRC’s intermediary role weakens when its soft coordination and protected experimentation cannot be backed by enforceable support: Goodwill-based alignment stalls (especially across municipalities), procurement does not mandate interoperability, and unclear legal bases for data sharing constrain scaling and legitimacy. More broadly, fragility increases where trust and administrative capacity are lower, legacy lock-in is higher, and privacy/sovereignty disputes cannot be credibly managed—shifting the BRC from accepted broker to contested authority.

Extending the boundary-conditions logic, Table 4 can be read as predictable failure modes for functional transfer. Specifically, without enforceable procurement or standard-setting, local purchasing cycles continually recreate silos faster than integration can remove them. Without clear legal bases and credible safeguards, coordination defaults to risk avoidance: Data sharing tightens, experimentation stays in low-stakes PoCs, and discretion is withdrawn after controversy. With weak delivery capacity (skills, stable funding, registry quality), even successful pilots are hard to sustain and scale, which can deepen vendor lock-in and erode trust. The data obtained during the research can specify these mechanisms conceptually but not trace their full trajectories in lower-trust or lower-capacity contexts; comparative, longitudinal cross-jurisdictional studies are needed for this.

The constraints on “functional transfer” are visible in the case evidence itself. Coordination is fragile where hierarchy is weak: Even in Norway, municipal alignment relies on “goodwill,” which sets clear limits on how far voluntary orchestration can go. Interoperability can stall when procurement and funding do not mandate standards—interviewees note that “nobody says that they need to be interoperable… it’s still very, very slow progress,” implying that transfer requires enforceable procurement/standard-setting capacity, not only technical solutions.

Legal foundations are a binding constraint on data reuse, so replication depends on legal work that legitimizes exchange across sectors. Key public-value trade-offs can also be structurally context-specific: Reliance on BankID accelerated service rollout but creates a governance dependence “the government does not directly own,” and interviewees explicitly raise concerns about “how much control we have,” illustrating sovereignty–efficiency tensions that may look different elsewhere. Finally, institutionalizing remains constrained by legacy and fragmentation: Interviewees highlight that legacy systems and local solutions create ongoing friction, which conditions how fast innovations can be stabilized and scaled.

6. Conclusions

Governments can decrease bureaucratic inefficiencies and increase the delivery of services, by making collaborative governance of entities involved in public-sector innovation and digital transformation a priority. This entails enabling relevant legal reforms and supporting experimentation, stakeholder participation, co-creation, and centralized digital infrastructures, while enhancing trust by being transparent. The path taken by Norway is an inspiring model of how digital governmental changes can be effectively scaled and modified to give broader societal benefits.

The case of the Brønnøysund Register Centre provides a robust model of how integrated digital infrastructure, enabled by collaborative governance and supportive legal frameworks, can transform public administration. The replicable aspects of the BRC model—from centralized digital registries and the once-only principle to openness to experimentation and stakeholder co-creation—offer valuable blueprints for other nations looking to accelerate their own digital government reforms.

What travels across borders is less a fixed organizational blueprint and more a set of functional levers: collaborative governance and pooled funding that diffuse knowledge and mobilize resources; legal frameworks that enable data reuse; lab mentality and sandboxes that sustain experimentation; stakeholder co-creation that deepens knowledge and legitimacy; centralized digital infrastructure that anchors use formation; and trust building practices that make high-capacity digital states politically acceptable.

Trust emerges as an explanatory mechanism rather than just a descriptive attribute. Empirically, it is operationalized through observed and reported patterns of (a) willingness to share sensitive information or data, (b) willingness to engage in experimentation under uncertainty, (c) perceptions of procedural fairness and neutrality of the intermediary, and (d) expectations regarding protection from sanction when initiatives fail.

The Brønnøysund Register Centre plays an instrumental role in this system-level architecture using controlled experimentation as a key mechanism of public-sector innovation. It tests, refines and scales digitized governance solutions in interaction with other public and private stakeholders in the vein of similar public-sector innovation agencies, as highlighted by Tõnurist et al. (2017). In this context, the BRC can ultimately function as a de facto public-sector innovation unit, embedded in a registry-based information infrastructure, which is continuously evolving and improving services by using iterative processes which are user-centred and technology-driven. Its activities influence and are influenced by a wider socio-technical system, which includes a range of foundational registries and other legal frameworks, identity solutions and collaborative networks, rather than being limited to a single organization. This is consistent with prevailing patterns of public-sector experimentation, in which innovation entities are having to act as “system orchestrators” of new digital solutions—facilitating agile policy development, co-creation and adaptive governance across multiple institutions, beyond their own organizational boundaries (Mazzucato, 2018).

The extent to which the BRC example is replicable has a great deal to do with the willingness and ability to build, from day one, the necessary trust among stakeholders. In addition, other nations could encounter obstacles such as cultural resistance, technical issues concerning old systems, or legal and regulatory issues. Mitigating these problems involves specific approaches in consideration of both local institutional and cultural backgrounds, robust capacity-building initiatives to eliminate disjunctions in IT expertise and the long-term political commitment to reform agendas. The contribution does not point to a “best practice” prescription but rather a mechanism-and-conditions account of how public-sector intermediation operates and what must be in place for similar arrangements to be viable elsewhere.

This suggests further research to focus more on how stakeholder engagement works, and how trust and transparency can be baked-in when dealing with digital transformation and public-sector innovation. Comparative research that examines the process of digital government reforms in other cultural and institutional contexts can lead to a greater understanding regarding ways of more precisely adapting the concepts underlying the BRC model to various political and administrative environments. Longitudinal analysis of digital transformation projects can also be performed to ultimately gain a deeper insight into how persistent leadership and evolving legal limits interact over time to either facilitate or limit digital innovation.

Future research could focus more on the micro-dynamics of trust, conflict, and repair by in-depth analysis of concrete decision episodes where coordination breaks down or public values collide. Comparative and longitudinal studies—especially in lower-trust or lower-capacity settings—can show how missing functional equivalents (legal bases, procurement levers, safeguards) shape failure trajectories and limit scaling over time. It should also examine power asymmetries in “voluntary” coordination, focusing on how control over registries, standards, identifiers, and shared platforms affects bargaining power, compliance, and the limits of goodwill-based alignment between the BRC and other agencies. Theoretically, this agenda can refine bureaucratic innovation research by developing and testing “infrastructural bureaucratic innovation” (innovation embedded in core administrative infrastructure, not only labs). Methodologically, it could benefit from mixed design approaches: cross-country comparison (e.g., BRC vs. digital agencies/innovation labs in Denmark, the Netherlands, Estonia), longitudinal pilot-to-scaling tracing, and quantitative measures of PIC functions across contexts.

With these provisions, the conclusions of this research can be applied as a possible roadmap for those countries which wish to emulate the successes of Norway in terms of its digital government. There is significant potential in this of contributing to a substantial efficiency improvement and enhancing citizen services that are implemented in an inclusive, transparent and sustainable manner.