The public sector is facing significant challenges regarding public services provision, including declination of users’ trust and limited resources. An alternative approach to traditional public service provision with the potential to address these challenges is the co-creation of public services. Co-creation promises to foster innovative solutions to provide high-quality services that respond to users’ needs. Considering this background, we aim at critically exploring public service co-creation via a scoping review, employing the PRISMA-ScR method. Our review focuses on 25 empirical studies out of 75 analyzed articles that examine the implementation of co-creation of (digital) public services and investigates how the empirical literature portrays the concept of public service co-creation. Our findings primarily suggest that co-creation can be implemented in a wide range of sectors and settings, to improve public services and to foster innovation, throughout the whole public service cycle, using a variety of digital, analog and hybrid co-creation tools and strategies. Yet, our review has also shown that there is still an implementation gap that needs to be bridged between knowing and doing in the context of public services co-creation in a digital setting.

A crucial challenge for the coordination of horizontal policy programs—those designed to tackle crosscutting issues—is how to motivate government organizations to contribute to such programs. Hence, it is crucial to study how practitioners in implementing organizations view and appreciate the coordination of such programs. Assisted by Q‐methodology, this inductive study reveals three significantly different “images”: central frame setting, networking via boundary spanners, and coordination beyond window dressing. Most surprisingly, different images show up among respondents within the same organizations and horizontal programs. The authors find that the images reflect elements of the literature: the resistance to hierarchical central control, the need for local differentiation and increased incentives, and a collaboration‐oriented culture. Most importantly, practitioners of implementing organizations perceive top‐down mechanisms as ineffective to achieve coordination and ask for adaptive arrangements, involvement, and deliberative processes when designing coordination arrangements and during the collaboration.