Leading Innovation within Government Agencies: What to Drive and What to Avoid

As innovation professionals, we too often look for inspiration from organizations such as Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Spotify, Google, etc. Cultures within these businesses are encourage transparency, experimentation and autonomy resulting in engaged workforce of the best and brightest minds, pumping out game changing products on-schedule, on-budget and on-point. We want that for the organizations that we support. We want to drive those behaviors.

The Key Challenges of Government Innovation

Last month, leaders in public sector innovation gathered to discuss ways of crowdsourcing new solutions to longstanding problems at IdeaScale’s Open Nation DC. Speakers from a range of agencies as diverse as the FDA and the US Coast Guard presented best practices on creating actionable change in government.

Security and Innovation Management

Systems security is one of the top five concerns for business executives this year. In the past two years, we’ve had some very troubling and very public data breaches of systems that we use every day. So it’s no wonder that the government (and other sectors) are prioritizing security for cloud software this year. But why are they doing it? Well, there are four key reasons that security matters for innovation management systems in particular:

Crowdsourcing Government?

Governments could be described as the largest and longest running crowd-funding schemes in existence. Sadly, whereas crowd-funding is seen as innovative, flexible, responsive, bottom up, transparent, enabling – among other things; governments would be hard pushed to receive similar accolades. However, times are changing and governments are beginning to adopt some of the characteristics of crowd-funding and crowdsourcing. But there is a long way to go.

2021-12-05T09:22:49-08:00January 9th, 2013|Categories: News, Trend Alert|Tags: , , , , |

Government’s promising role in fostering open innovation

One key partner that has the potential to greatly affect and enhance the human condition is government. This author prefers the open market as the main catalyst for change, but given the complexity and scale of certain types of research, government can play a vital role in advancing knowledge in science and technology by supporting basic research. While some governments have been funding research for quite some time, the inefficiency of the process may be keeping new discoveries from being commercialized.