INN OVATIVE STATE
While acknowledging the importance
of these aspects of bureaucracy, Chopra
nevertheless insists that the information
technology revolution that began in the late
1990s has created the conditions for a new
structure to break through the impediments.
He built on his own background, first his
education at The Johns Hopkins University
and the Kennedy School of Government
(Harvard), then as an entrepreneur and
later as chief technology officer of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the Tim Kaine administration (2006-2010) to make the case
(with a strong endorsement from Governor
Kaine) to newly elected President Obama
for how a national chief technology officer
could help the country.
He cites the “open innovation” concepts of Henry Chesbrough, professor of
business administration at the University
of California, Berkeley, as the moving force
behind much of the high-tech innovation
of private businesses in the 1990s. Chesbrough emphasized “giving more information to more people sooner” as the key
idea. Applied to government, this means
using government “to liberate or harness
the energies of the private sector.” This approach involves four tool sets:
1. Open data: enabling the public to access more government digital data, not
only for transparency but also, more important, so that the information can be incorporated in new products or services.
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2. Impatient convening: Government’s
inviting the private sector to work collaboratively on standards that lower barriers
to entry and foster competition.
3. Challenges and prizes: Widely inviting
proposals to solve a particular problem,
outside the cumbersome and often wasteful government procurement processes.
4. Attracting talent: Recruiting entrepreneurs into the government to manage the
preceding three tool sets to focus on actual accomplishments and stimulate breakthrough results in a tight time frame.
In his book, Chopra cites a number of
examples of apparent successful and consequential implementation, including Department of Health and Human Services
initiatives to make health data more widely
available and useful; a San Francisco Bay
Area project to make zoning information
and requirements more readily available
to prospective commercial tenants; a publicly available website to track and display
legislative proposals in Virginia online; and
the movement of the Federal Register, the
official record of activities and proposed
actions throughout the federal government, to a readily accessible and indexed
public website.
In recent comments about what he
learned on his book tour, he says, “On
my journey thus far, including stops on
the ‘Daily Show’ and ‘Morning Joe,’ I’ve
w w w. i n f o r m s . o r g