Innovative government: Oxymoron or something to cultivate?

Innovation is often viewed as the province of the private sector, but the current economic climate and other big challenges such as terrorism, energy policy and health care mean that government will need to become more innovative to tackle those challenges.

That’s the message of “Innovation State,” an article by Bill Eggers & Shalabh Kumar Singh in the Deloitte Review, Winter 2009.

Already there are pockets of government innovation, including the  “311″ citizen complaint hotlines that started in Baltimore. (Call the number and you get the relevant agency person within 10 seconds.) But the innovation efforts are sporadic, piecemeal and easily torpedoed by entrenched stakeholders. The authors say widespread government innovation will require the following steps:

• Cultivate new ideas by engaging employees. For example, the U.S. Transportation Security Agency’s “Idea Factory” is a secure intranet that allows employees to submit ideas for improving agency operations and processes. Employees have submitted some 4,500 ideas — and 20 have been implemented.
• Replicate the great ideas from other federal and state agencies — customizing them to meet local needs. The Texas Performance Review “has saved the state billions of dollars over the years by searching far and wide for innovations that can be applied to Texas government.”
• Establish partnerships among government agencies and between government, private industry, universities and nonprofits to generate new resources and new ideas. “When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to transform the city’s under-performing public school system, he used partnerships to launch innovative pilot programs and sidestep organizational logjams.”

My view: The biggest challenge of all will be creating a “culture of innovation” inside the bureaucracy. It’s not certain that this is even possible (bureaucracy and innovation do seem mutually exclusive). But the nation’s challenges are so great that we’ll need to try. As the article concludes: “This will be difficult, and government will not likely acquire a reputation for innovation next month or even next year. Someday, however, innovative government may roll off the tongue naturally.”

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Twitter: RT @mitchbetts Can government be innovative? May be an oxymoron, but we need to try. Big challenges require innovative approaches. http://bit.ly/wwL9F

Future shocks: Killer robots, hyperaging, space tourism, intelligent cars, resource wars

The Washington Post Outlook section (4 January 2009) is full of articles under the label “future shocks.” A sampling:

The world won’t be aging gracefully. “For the world’s wealthy nations, the 2020s are set to be a decade of hyperaging and population decline. Many countries will experience fiscal crisis, economic stagnation and ugly political battles over entitlements and immigration. Meanwhile, poor countries will be buffeted by their own demographic storms. Some will be overwhelmed by massive age waves that they can’t afford, while others will be whipsawed by new explosions of youth whose aspirations they cannot satisfy. The risk of social and political upheaval and military aggression will grow throughout the developing world — even as the developed world’s capacity to deal with these threats weakens. The rich countries have been aging for decades, due to falling birthrates and rising life spans. But in the 2020s, this aging will get an extra kick as large postwar baby boom generations move into retirement.” — Neil Howe and Richard Jackson are researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and co-authors of “The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century.”

Coming to the battlefield: Stone-cold robot killers. “Armed robots will all be snipers. Stone-cold killers, every one of them. They will aim with inhuman precision and fire without human hesitation. They will not need bonuses to enlist or housing for their families or expensive training ranges or retirement payments.” — John Pike is the director of the military information Web site GlobalSecurity.org.

The next big things:

• Space tourism in 2012 (+/- 2 years) >>>>
  

  Spaceship for space tourism

• Intelligent cars in 2014 (+/- 4 years)
• Telemedicine in 2015 (+/- 4 years)
• Thought power (brain signals controlling systems) in 2020 (+/- 9 years)
• Artificial intelligence in 2021 (+/- 7 years)
• Smart robots in 2022 (+/- 7 years)
• Alternative energy in 2022 (+/- 9 years)
• Cancer cure in 2024 (+/- 8 years)

— William E. Halal, president of TechCast LLC

Global warming could lead to warfare over scarce resources (e.g., arable land and fresh water); mass migrations; and territorial disputes over newly available energy resources (e.g. Arctic oil). — James R. Lee runs American University’s Inventory of Conflict and Environment project. He’s at work on a book on climate change and conflict.

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Related:

• Stanford researchers trying to develop robot like the Jetson’s Rosie
• 2080: Global warming leads to floods, droughts, agricultural disasters, hunger
  

Measuring innovation: The top five R&D metrics

The following are the top five R&D metrics used by industry (2008):

1. R&D spending as a percentage of sales (77%)
2. Total patents filed/pending/awarded/rejected (61%)
3. Total R&D headcount (59%)
4. Current-year percentage sales due to new products released in the past six years (56%)
5. Number of new products released (53%)

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Source: Goldense Group Inc.’s 2008 Product Development Metrics Survey
Base: 200 companies that design and develop new products
Discovered via ThomasNet’s Industrial Market Trends

Improving the customer experience

Bruce Temkin, an analyst and blogger at “Customer Experience Matters,” provides a thoughtful set of definitions, below:

• customer experience: the perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization
• the perfect customer experience: a set of interactions that consistently exceeds the needs and expectations of a customer
• customer experience management (CEM): the discipline of increasing loyalty by exceeding customers’ needs and expectations

There are three key elements of CEM:

• discipline (ongoing activities, not slogans)
• increasing loyalty (for profitability, not altruism)
• customers’ needs and expectations “CEM is not about technology deployments or internal milestones. It needs to be calibrated from the perspective of target customers.”

The last phrase is worth repeating: “…from the perspective of target customers.” I’ve long maintained that good customer service occurs when the organization sees things from the customer’s perspective — OK, from my perspective!

Temkin warns that improving the customer experience is hard work. “CEM is easier to define than to do,” he says. You can download his (free) 11-page PDF booklet titled: “The Six Laws of Customer Experience.”

Rubbermaid sees its future as innovation + premium prices

Newell Rubbermaid Inc. plans to trim its product line — eliminating low-end plastic storage containers, trash cans and office chair mats — in favor of high-end, innovative products. The company “plans to invest more heavily in research and advertising for more-innovative products,” according to a Wall Street Journal article, aptly headlined: “Rubbermaid Wants to Be Less of a Commodity” (16 July 2008). The innovative products include containers for fruits and vegetables with vented lids to keep those foods fresher.

The primary reason for trimming the low-end of the product line is the rising cost of the petrochemical-based resin used for making plastic products.

State experiments with the four-day work week

Utah became the first U.S. state to put its government workforce on a four-day work week, and some other states may follow. The “Working 4 Utah” initiative — a response to soaring energy costs and tight budgets — will begin in August.

Government service hours will be extended to 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and offices will be closed Fridays (except for essential public services).

Utah expects to cut electrical and utility costs (13.5 hours on Fridays) and will monitor the energy savings. For employees, it may mean they can get household chores done on Fridays, according to Workforce Management (14 July 2008). But day care and public transportation services will need to accommodate the extended hours (10-hour work days) Monday through Thursday.

State officials in Minnesota, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Arkansas are examining the feasibility of a four-day schedule, Workforce Management reported. Also, Colorado is mulling it over. Various county governments and towns are, too.

World’s first carbon-neutral garment factory

Is this the start of a rush towards green factories? “MAS Holdings claims to have built the world’s first carbon-neutral garment factory in Sri Lanka,” reports Anthony Townsend at The Institute for the Future. The plant will make underwear for retailer Marks & Spencer in the UK.

While the plant cost 25% more to build than a traditional design (it would have been 15% without some frills due to being a showcase), with rising fuel prices it’s expected to pay for the difference in less than five years.

According to MAS Holdings:

It features the biggest installation of solar panels to date in Sri Lanka, which will provide around 10% of the total electricity required for the plant. The remaining electricity will be mini-hydro, sourced through a green power agreement that MAS pioneered for Sri Lanka earlier this month.

Apparently this is part of Marks & Spencer’s wide-ranging effort to be carbon-neutral by 2012.

Maybe what we need is a Financial Services Corps

Melissa Koide, an analyst at the New America Foundation, has an interesting idea for helping low- and middle-income American households make more-informed financial decisions. The idea is to create a Financial Services Corps of financial advisors to counsel households on today’s rather complex financial landscape.

The policy proposal has four key elements:

1. Enlisting financial experts and advisors to deliver personalized financial counseling and planning to low- and middle-income households;
2. Providing the tools, resources, support to local, regional, and workplace-based initiatives to ensure these families are effectively reached;
3. Collecting & analyzing data to understand the short-, medium- and long-term financial education, counseling and planning needs of these households; and
4. Exploring new strategies and approaches to financial education & advice — through an innovations fund.

I have a few concerns, such how to make sure the financial advisors provide unbiased advice, i.e., not biased towards certain investment strategies where the advisor has a conflict of interest (e.g., gets a commission). I also wonder whether this will be a magnet for lawsuits, filed by families upset that the well-meaning advice ended up losing them money.

But I applaud the fresh thinking that went into this. It’s an improvement over the Bush administration’s volunteer initiative for financial literacy.

China ascendant; U.S. tech prowess peaked in 1999

China is often seen as just a low-cost manufacturing outpost, but the new “High Tech Indicators” study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology clearly shows that the Asian powerhouse has much bigger aspirations.

The study of worldwide technological competitiveness suggests China will soon pass the U.S. in the critical ability to develop basic science and technology — and then commercialize those developments.

“Since World War II, the United States has been the main driver of the global economy. Now we have a situation in which technology products are going to be appearing in the marketplace that were not developed or commercialized here [in the U.S.]. We won’t have had any involvement with them and may not even know they are coming,” said Nils Newman, co-author of the study.

Georgia Tech’s “High Tech Indicators” study ranks 33 nations relative to one another on “technological standing,” an output factor that indicates each nation’s recent success in exporting high technology products. Four major input factors help build future technological standing: national orientation toward technological competitiveness, socioeconomic infrastructure, technological infrastructure and productive capacity.

A chart showing change in the technological standing of the 33 nations is dominated by one feature – a long and continuous upward line that shows China moving from “in the weeds” to world technological leadership over the past 15 years.

The 2007 statistics show China with a technological standing of 82.8, compared to 76.1 for the U.S., 66.8 for Germany and 66.0 for Japan. Just 11 years ago, China’s score was only 22.5. The U.S. peaked in 1999 with a score of 95.4.

Peripheral vision

Five things that caught my eye:

• After months of scandals, virtual banks in Second Life are being shut down.
• The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission plans to shift the target of its toy-safety enforcement efforts from manufacturers (which are mostly untouchable overseas now) to the retailers.
• Google reports that it processes over 20 petabytes of data per day.
• U.S. and Canadian antitrust agencies are investigating whether chocolate makers have colluded to fix prices, trying to offset higher dairy costs.
• iMantri is a new Web site that “seeks to match mentors up with mentees using a niche social network that focuses on goals and competencies.”