The call for innovation

By Adrienne Valdez | 4 October 2011 | Permanent link | 0 comments

In the past, when the government identified a problem, it would make a plan, do necessary studies, consult the experts, and carry out the implementation.

That was because the government had the best resources in the society, and was able to mobilise these resources most effectively for the benefits of addressing specific challenges. Think about how government IT started in the 70s and 80s - teams of in-house implementers were built to handle the projects which private sector did not have the capacity of doing.

However that is the old approach; following the strong growth of the region’s private IT sector, crowdsourcing, getting the interesting and innovative ideas from the public from even before the conception stage of a programme, has been gaining ground. This is a natural evolution, especially when more and more people are realising the benefits of open government and jumping onto the bandwagon.

One interesting example to cite is challenge.gov, an online challenge platform by the US General Services Administration that empowers the US Government and the public to bring the best ideas and top talent to bear on the nation’s most pressing challenges, the latest milestone in the Administration’s commitment to promote innovation.

On Challenge.gov, government agencies post challenges where the public can propose a submission, discuss the challenge, and show support with incentives to encourage citizens to participate.

And as governments open more datasets to the public, we see a lot of data “mashup” competitions; way back 2008 by the UK government until recently by New Zealand and Australia. This month, Taipei City Government is going to announce the winners of its own App development contest, based on the open data platform it just launched.

These competitions serve as practical demonstrations of the benefits of open access to government data, engaging and challenging users to provide innovative ways to mash up public information. In one word, it is a very cost effective way to reap the benefits of opening government data, for businesses, citizens, government itself and the society as a whole.

As more enabling technologies become available, the further need for innovation follows. These government-public collaboration on innovation not only takes in ideas to make the government perform better, but also improves the relationships between the government and the public, and makes engagement more effective.

At our social media training for government, we often hear stories from participating delegates that involving the citizens right from the beginning of policy formulation or project conception actually would win government more supporters than they previously had.

In an interview which was featured in the August 2011 issue of FutureGov, James Kang, Singapore’s GCIO, says that co-creation between the government and citizens is the best way moving forwards to solve the complexity that the government could not single-handedly deal with.

Plato once said that “necessity is the mother of invention”; but in the age where man has created almost everything he could possibly need, the new challenge lies in innovation.