Policy Labs as Arenas for Boundary Spanning – Evidence from the Digital Transformation in Germany

The German Online Access Act (OZG) obliges the administration at all federal levels to offer their public services digitally by the end of 2022. As innovative key element of its implementation, so-called digitalisation labs were created, bringing together representatives from federal, state, and local authorities to jointly develop digital solutions for selected services, in conjunction with end-users and moderated by consulting companies. Following new institutionalist organisation theory, we argue that these digitalisation labs are arenas for boundary spanning, shaping not only the capabilities of the participants' organisations but also governmental collaboration across the state levels as well as with external actors. We assume that the intensity of boundary spanning varies across digitalisation labs depending on the service. We compare two digitalisation labs focusing on two different services and thus situated in two different organisational fields: "immigration and emigration" and "building and housing". Based on qualitative expert interviews with participants and organisers of the digitalisation labs as well as a document analysis, we show that the immigration lab provided different opportunities for bureaucratic boundary spanning than the housing lab. Moreover, also external participants, most notably consultancies and tech companies, use both labs to span the boundaries between public and private sector activities.