The purpose of this paper is to examine productivity at the level of a welfare service system. This approach aims at optimizing the performance of the whole system and to avoid sub‐optimizing the production of individual services or organizations. The paper also aims to develop a definition for the concept of welfare service system productivity and demonstrate its applicability.
Earlier research highlights the need for the welfare service sector to measure the impacts of their services. However, it seems that the welfare services lack measures to show their long-term effects and impacts. This paper aims to present a framework to measure the multidimensional impacts of welfare service innovations and report the empirical results from two case studies.