How innovation can help you do more with fewer resources.

• Author: Eggers, William D.
• Position: Company overview

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The current budget crises faced by all levels of government today are as urgent and provocative a call as any for government innovation. Governments have had to quickly develop immediate fixes, but over the medium and long term, innovation will be required for more sustainable solutions.

Innovation will be the key to doing more with fewer resources. With most states and local governments expecting large budget shortfalls in 2010, they will need to find new and more efficient ways to deliver better value for taxpayers' money Government regulators will need to be much more cognizant of what is going on in the marketplace so they can react to trends that imperil taxpayers, and find ways to share information to minimize reaction times. Government leaders will need to look at mission redundancies across all agencies.

Governments will need to find ways to cut costs by doing things in different ways--using technologies to rethink how governments are organized and deliver services. Today however, few public-sector organizations display a systemic commitment to innovation. When change happens, it tends to be either in response to a crisis or because an individual champions a specific cause.

Government can and does innovate. But attention to innovation tends to be piecemeal, short-term, and narrow--focused almost exclusively on trying to figure out a way to generate more good ideas, address a crisis, or leave a legacy around a specific policy position, public-sector organizations will need to move from a culture of "innovation by accident" to one in which innovation is part of the organization's DNA. To do that, they need to take a methodical view of the innovation process and create a roadmap for converting ideas into effective solutions that earn the support of stakeholders.

INNOVATION IS A PROCESS

Approach innovation as a process, not a one-time event. Developing good ideas is only one component of generating innovation--and often not the most important component. It is necessary to develop strategies for each phase of the innovation lifecyle: idea generation, idea selection, idea conversion, and idea diffusion. It is in the last three stages that innovation often goes off the rail in the public sector.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration's Idea Factory demonstrates the importance of a systemic approach to innovation. The Idea Factory is a secure intranet site that allows employees to submit ideas for improving agency operations and processes. By the end of January 2009, employees had submitted 7,837 ideas and 69,712 comments, of which 39 had been implemented. The program was successful because employees' ideas were acknowledged and implemented, creating a positive environment for submitting more ideas.

Response to the Idea Factory has sparked widespread interest in the idea as a method for breaking through organizational barriers to innovation. The site is an excellent example of how to create a positive environment for innovative ideas.

The guiding principle for any initiative to generate innovations is to understand that ultimately, you will get only as many useful ideas as you have the ability to implement. A purely linear view of the Idea Factory process would suggest that because employees submitted so many good ideas, all those ideas would therefore translate into-multiple initiatives. However, a systems view would suggest that so many good ideas were submitted because these ideas were acknowledged, implemented, and diffused, creating a positive environment for submitting more ideas.

STEP I: CREATE A PROACTIVE IDEATION PROCESS

Rather than letting occasional good ideas drive the innovation process, governments should take control of the process by developing a system designed to consistently...