Scaling Up Policy Innovations in the Federal Government Lessons from the Trenches

摘要

Large bureaucracies such as those of the federal government are notoriously slow to innovate. But in recent years, new technology-enabled approaches to helping government meet its public obligations have begun to find a foothold in bureaucratic culture. Many of these approaches rely on what is called "open innovation," which means, in essence, that in today's era of distributed knowledge, an organization should look both within and to external sources for ideas and should involve both its own personnel and outside parties and communities in creative efforts. In practice, open-innovation approaches such as incentive prizes and crowdsourcing are proving to be increasingly effective for achieving policy objectives across a variety of government agencies and programs. Consider these examples: 1. Thanks to a Federal Trade Commission incentive prize-the $50,000 Robocall Challenge-the Telephone Science Corporation now provides a free service called Nomorobo that blocks illegal computer-generated calls to US telephones. The service, the company says, has blocked more than 272 million robocalls since 2013.