Innovation

Report card day: Agencies remain average or below on IT reforms. House lawmakers are set to release the second scorecard grading agencies’ implementation of the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) and the progress across all four categories is limited.

This nation stands on the verge of a new era in aviation.

The national airspace system is one of the largest and safest in the world. It’s also the busiest: in FY 2010, more than 700 million passengers flew on U.S. air carriers.

(Dan Blair, President of the National Academy of Public Administration, collaborated on this blog)

As promised in an earlier blog post on this topic, the IBM Center now has a report, “Managing Innovation Prizes in Government,” by Luciano Kay, with the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

President Obama has made private sector innovation a centerpiece of the Administration’s agenda for growth and job creation.  This is a subject that has broad support across the spectrum:  citizens, businesses and governments all look to commercial activity as an economic engine; new technologies play a key role in this pursuit.  The Nation’s Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, has been a very visible leader of this activity, with frequent and recent blogs through the White House and media web sites (

In 2013 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) embarked on an ambitious effort to modernize its information technology infrastructure, transforming from an agency with 207 different IT systems to one with a cloud-based common data platform that would play a signifi- cant role in creating a more dynamic and agile enterprise.

Michael J. Keegan

VA and VistA: Can they be fixed? The Department of Veterans Affairs is rushing to make changes to its IT infrastructure and systems before the next administration enters the White House. And skeptical lawmakers, oversight bodies and outside experts are cautiously optimistic about the eventual outcomes.

While there is certainly a place for these types of organizations and goals, innovation – and the creativity that goes along with it – can be applied to a myriad of organizational issues that may not garner the same attention. In addition, client feedback and user-centered thinking are valuable sources of innovation, which anyone can tap.

Innovation might not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of training or loan repayment or immigration information, but that’s exactly what’s taking place with meaningful improvements for end users.

Blog Co-Author:  Haynes Cooney

Why?  Because prizes are effective.  Under the right circumstances, they can be more effective than traditional investments in research and development.

Lowery says: “After falling out of favor for decades, such high-publicity, fat-reward contest came into vogue again in the aughts in the wake of the 1996 Ansari X Prize for advances in commercial spaceflight” which Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne won in 2004.