WASHINGTON—The health of American democracy depends in part on marshaling the science and practice of innovation to bolster faith in the legitimacy of government by improving its effectiveness, according to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the country’s leading science and technology think tank. In the report, ITIF proposes a detailed set of recommendations for the White House Office of American Innovation to transform the enterprise of government by applying customer-driven innovations to federal processes, services, and organizational models.
“The Trump administration has created the Office of American Innovation to help the federal government ‘run like a great American company.’ We applaud that goal. It won’t be easy—but it can be done,” said ITIF President Robert D. Atkinson, the report’s lead author. “It will require systemic changes across the federal enterprise to inject the philosophy and practice of customer-driven innovation into the core functioning of government.”
“Improving the performance of government has been a perennial topic for 60 years,” said Atkinson. “The challenge for most of the post-War period was to mimic the management models of Fortune 500 companies that were similar to government in their bureaucratic structures. But today the challenge is much different. It’s partly about using technology to transform and become more flexible—which is hard for big companies and even more so in the federal enterprise. And yet it’s about more than just technology—it’s about adopting customer-driven innovation to improve all government processes, services, and organizational models.”
ITIF proposes actionable recommendations in six key areas—institutional models; approach and culture; resources, tools, and best practices; metrics and incentives; financing; oversight and review; and procurement, as follows:
Institutional Models
- Appoint a Chief Innovation Officer in the White House.
- Require agencies to incorporate an innovation component in all strategic plans.
- Establish innovation “skunk works.”
- Expand the presidential innovation fellows program.
- Create an innovation ideas panel within the Office of Management and Budget.
- Temporarily exempt some federal agencies from stifling rules.
Approach and Culture
- Inculcate design thinking and innovation practices within agencies.
- Identify 20 to 50 core practices to be transformed through innovation.
- Create an expectation for innovation, especially trials, tests, and pilot programs.
Resources, Tools, and Best Practices
- Document innovation success stories.
- Support creation of innovation tool kits.
- Train support functions how to say yes to innovation.
- Establish a bottom-up innovation tool for federal employees.
- Establish internal cultures for innovation.
- Enable and encourage federal agencies to talk to “customers.”
Metrics and Incentives
- Make “innovating” an explicit performance expectation for senior officials.
- Establish a federal innovation awards program to recognize innovators.
- Require more agencies to enroll in “Yelp for Government.”
- Rank agency functions in terms of innovation.
Financing
- Allow agencies to divert a small share of their budgets to innovation projects.
- Allow more shared savings partnerships.
Oversight and Review
- Undertake formal efforts to better understand innovation processes and “good” risk taking.
- Call out agencies for not innovating.
- Refrain from penalizing failed efforts at innovation.
- Require innovation to be an explicit criterion in procurement processes.
- Ensure pre-award contract specifications are broad enough to enable innovative solutions to be offered.
- Allow contractors to innovate post-award.
- Enable more private companies to provide federal services.
- Establish government “platforms” for vendors to compare innovation and performance metrics.
“When it comes to the federal government, it’s as if we are living in a 20th century analogue world wrapped in bureaucracy, paper, and delay,” said Atkinson. “Productivity growth is likely anemic; service quality is often frustratingly slow and often not fully responsive; and the quality of technology lags the private sector. Whatever you think about the appropriate size and role of government, everyone should be able to agree that government should be as productive and effective as possible.”
Read summary. | Read report. (PDF)