From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Federal Open Innovation

Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Chris Mihm, Managing
Director, Strategic Issues

Related GAO Work: GAO-17-14: Open Innovation: Practices to Engage
Citizens and Effectively Implement Federal Initiatives

Released: October 2016


[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's October
2016. If you've ever gone online to learn more about anything, you've
probably heard of Wikipedia. This online encyclopedia harnesses the
ideas, expertise, and resources of the entire online community to draft
and refine its entries. Such engagement and collaboration is an example
of open innovation. Federal agencies are increasingly using similar
strategies to address complex challenges. A team lead by Chris Mihm,
Managing Director of GAO's Strategic Issues team, recently looked at
federal agencies' efforts to use open innovation approaches. Jacques
Arsenault sat down with Chris to talk about what they found.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Can you tell me what open innovation is and how
it might benefit the federal government?

[ Chris Mihm: ] Of course. The open innovation is a term that's been
around for a number of years now, and basically it covers two things.
One, it's a set of tools and strategies that organizations, agencies,
can use to engage the public and others from the private sector,
not-for-profit sector, academia to harness in their ideas, and their
expertise, and their perspectives in order to help create public
objectives. And so basically, it's opening up government in its
decision-making in providing wider avenues for citizen engagement.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ]   So then, what are some of the kinds of
approaches or open innovation tools that federal agencies can use?

[ Chris Mihm: ] There's a number of ways, and some of them are going to
be quite familiar to people. Things like crowdsourcing, which is
basically putting out an idea, having an open call for voluntary
assistance on a problem, and letting the public and other experts kind
of weigh in with some answers. There are things like open data
collaboration and things like, you know, prize challenges in which you
actually offer a prize to an individual or groups that help with a
solution with a particular problem. So there's a variety of different
tools that are out there that are being used by government agencies. The
key thing here is to, for the agencies to have real clarity on--what's
the purpose that they're looking for out of one of these open innovation
strategies. It's, you just don't do it because it would be fun or kind
of neat to do. You do it because there's a very specific set of
questions that you're asking, and that drives which particular tool that
you're going to be interested in looking at.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ]  And were there particular examples that your
team found of how agencies are using these specifically?

[ Chris Mihm: ] Of course. And let me give you an example from NASA. In
March 2015, NASA launched the Asteroid Data Hunter application. Talk
about something that's pretty important. I want to know if there's
asteroids that are coming towards planet Earth. What this was, this was
an app that was built through a NASA challenge and is designed to allow
citizen scientists to detect asteroids contributing to and obviously
supplementing the professional knowledge within NASA. Likewise, we have
over at Open FDA at the Food and Drug Administration, which was launched
in 2014. It's an open data platform that FDA uses to make available key
databases in a format that allows research and developers to more easily
use that data. One of those is obviously the FDA is just providing good
government information out there so citizens can use that information.
The NASA one is an example of where NASA is saying to citizens and
scientists, help us solve a particular problem. There's another one
that's, that, you know, we've been particularly impressed with is the
Every Day Counts, which is one that the Department of Transportation
has. And what this does is that every 2 years since 2009, DOT's Federal
Highway Administration has used an Every Day Counts to identify
innovations that would improve highway project delivery. And so what
they have is they have teams of federal, state, local industry experts
implement the chosen ideas through what is called an ideation process,
or idea generation process.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Now you looked at a number of agencies. Can you
talk about how different agencies are approaching this differently?

[ Chris Mihm: ] What we looked at is six different agencies, and 15
different open innovation initiatives that are consistent with the lists
that I mentioned earlier. And what they're doing is this has two
purposes. One is that it opens up government, allows citizens more of an
opportunity to influence the decision-making and the path that
government takes. It also helps the agencies achieve what they want to
do. And so it's a bit of a win-win situation in that regard.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] So you mentioned that one of the keys is for
agencies to figure out what is the best strategy. So what are some of
the things that they can look at when they're trying to develop that
approach?

[ Chris Mihm: ] Well, the first thing that they want to do in thinking
about the big purpose, they want to identify, what's the purpose that
you're actually going here with? And so if you're looking at collecting
information and perspectives, that takes you down one set of strategies
that you may want to consider. If you're looking in order to increase
public awareness for something, basically getting the public to know
more about what you're doing and the opportunities that the agency has,
that leads you down a different strategy. If you have a particular
scientific problem or public policy problem that you want to bring
together public expertise, scientific expertise, that could be a
different strategy that you would use. So the first thing we found is
that the agencies really need to think about what's the purpose, and
then that drives the strategy. The second, and related to that, is they
want to make sure that they have the capabilities in order to
effectively manage these things. And so they're not zero cost. They are
very helpful in the end. Nobody told us that, oh, this was a waste of
our time. We don't want to do this. But they're not zero cost. They
require some talent on the part of the agencies, follow-through,
structure in the open government initiative. So those are the two big
things. You want to make sure you have clarity on the purpose, and you
want to make sure you have the capability in order to execute on that
purpose.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] And so finally then, what would you say is the
bottom line of this report?

[ Chris Mihm: ] The bottom line is that this is another tool and
strategy that agencies can use in order to provide citizens with an
opportunity to be involved in government decision-making while at the
same time helping to make and achieve the agency missions and the agency
goals.

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