10 Ways Open Innovation Can Transform Your Agency
Starting this week, I will be doing a 10-part series on open innovation and how it can transform government agencies.
What is open innovation?
Open innovation is a phrase that was coined by Henry Chesbrough as, “…the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets forexternal use of innovation, respectively.”
In regards to government, I would define open innovation as the ability to tap the collective knowledge of employees and/or constituents to drive agency innovation.
Open innovation is more than just collecting and rating ideas by popularity- it’s about taking concepts and making them into real solutions. Think of open innovation as a process of growing a tree from a seed (pictured below), which is quite a daunting task. An idea from an employee and/or citizen is like a seed, but you cannot just plant it an expect it to grow on its own. It takes lots of watering, weeding and cultivating to stimulate the seed to grow into something more. The real question is who does the work? The most effective model of open innovation allows employees and/or constituents to do the legwork (watering, weeding, etc.) to grow the ideas and make them actionable.
In 2009, I deployed one of the first local government open innovation portals called Manor Labs. Manor Labs gives citizens and employees of Manor, Texas the ability to submit ideas to help make the City of Manor more efficient, transparent and cost-effective. Participants can go to a dedicated website that allows them to submit an idea for any department within the City of Manor. After submission, ideas gothrough a structured process to take the best ideas from a concept to solution.
Over the next 10-weeks I will introduce lessons learned from Manor and other agencies that have embraced open innovation as amodel in government.
The first way open innovation can transform your agency is by…
Helping Identify Problems.
Background: In most agencies I’ve worked with, problems are identified through informal channels that are not well understood or even inclusive of employees and/or citizens. With open innovation as a model, you can give employees and citizens the ability to not just identify problems, but recommend solutions for addressing the problems (which I’ll go into more next week).
How does it help? Identifying problems is the first step to solving them. Agencies have very limited resources that can be utilized to proactively identify current or potential problems. Most resources are applied in a reactionary-setting as the problem develops and escalates in severity. The ability to distribute or crowdsource the identification of problems allows them to be addressed earlier, which saves significant time and money.
What do you think?
Should citizens be allowed to help identify problems in government agencies? How does your current agency identify problems?