Collaborative innovation in the public sector is increasingly used as a strategy for balancing citizens’ rising expectations for public services with limited public resources. This article suggests that public polices construct citizens as clients, consumers, or coproducers and thereby encourage or discourage certain behaviours, with different potential contributions to innovation. The article conceptualises a new role, that of citizens’ as co-innovators, and offers an analytical model that can be used in future studies of how public managers can act as civic enablers by creating different spaces for public innovation on the basis of the applicable citizen role