Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing in the Public Sector – 11 Great Reads

As I am preparing for upcoming talk that in part focuses on open innovation and crowd-sourcing in the public sector, I want to share some of blog posts and articles that I find interesting.

There were many good insights and I have inserted snippets for each read to give you an idea on what to expect. I am sure you can find lots of inspiration here.

Please leave a comment if you can share other good reads or cases!

• The Public Innovator’s Playbook: Nurturing Bold Ideas in Goverment

The goal of this book is to improve this track record—to help governments become serial innovators. The book describes how public organizations can develop and sustain a culture of innovation.

• Extending Open Innovation to Open Government: a Roadmap for New Opportunities in Citizensourcing

Consequently, the question arises whether public management, in terms of “Citizensourcing”, should also include the knowledge and experience of clients, users, and external actors into the public innovation and value creation process: can citizens act as contributor to public tasks that are traditionally performed by an administrative employee (mostly a civil servant)?

• Open innovation works in the public sector, say federal CTOs

“We’ve demonstrated that “open innovation,” the crowdsourcing of citizen expertise to enhance government innovation, delivers real results. Fundamentally, we believe that the American people, when equipped with the right tools, can solve many problems.”

• The White House – Open Innovator’s Toolkit

A list of links to 20 examples on how the public sector in the U.S. uses open innovation, crowdsourcing.

• Can Twitter Save California’s Budget Crisis?

The State should substantially expand the use of publically available tiplines and online message feeds. (You can also check out the MyIdea4CA.com, which built further on the ideas mentioned in the article.)

• Open Innovation and Public Policy in Europe

This is a longer report by Professor Henry Chesbrough and Professor Wim Vanhaverbeke, which offers several recommendations on how governments can work with open innovation. You can also check out this video interview with the professors.

• 2012: Open Innovation for Governments

Thus far, we’ve focused our work in three core areas: (1) helping governments adopt open source practices so that they can benefit from each other’s investments in technology; (2) supporting the development of “open platforms”, such as Open311, which represent a fundamentally different approach to technology development; and (3) building open knowledge infrastructure around the policies and practices involved in implementing these approaches.

• 10 Ways Open Innovation Can Transform Your Agency

In most agencies I’ve worked with, problems are identified through informal channels that are not well understood or even inclusive of employees and/or citizens.  With open innovation as a model, you can give employees and citizens the ability to not just identify problems, but recommend solutions for addressing the problems.

You can find other blog posts in this series here.

• Can the US Government Use Open Innovation to Save $1 Billion?

Furthermore, he identified four key policy levers for open innovation and some examples where they are already working in government:

- Democratize government data

- Encourage market transparency

- Cultivate innovation ecosystem

- Create capacity for innovation

These experiments demonstrate the open innovation has REAL potential to create public value.

• Government as a Platform for Open Innovation Key to Creating Sustainable Cities

There’s no way to succeed with the old approach to city governance. People not only want new services but also more diverse ones that can speak to the needs of every community. Governments can’t keep up with demands now, and it will only become more difficult in the future.

• Open Innovation in DC

It is shrinking the size of government (“the cloud” alone is already saving billions in IT procurement), but improving its ability to help citizens succeed. It is “pro-growth” in its truest sense: using public policy to promote economic growth through entrepreneurship and innovation. And it’s unlocking the creativity of citizens to make things better – whether they work in government or just build on its open API’s.