A report from the Partnership for Public Service contains suggestions to encourage and sustain innovation in government, based on recommendations of current and former senior officials of the executive and legislative branches and the private and nonprofit sectors. These include:
* “Embedding and institutionalizing innovation and technol¬ogy skills more widely across the federal enterprise. For example, contracting, grants and personnel officials need to have a deeper understanding of how technology can help them do their jobs more efficiently, and more people need to be trained in human-centered design, gamifica¬tion, data science, data visualization, crowdsourcing and other new ways of working.”
* “Continue developing an evidence-based approach to governance, including a greater use of methods like A/B testing (a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs the best); establishing a clearinghouse for success and failure stories and best practices; and encour¬aging overseers to be more open to innovation.”
* “Platforms such as data.gov represent initial steps in the direction of enabling data-driven governance. Much more can be done, however, to open-up data and for the agencies to become better consumers of data, to improve decision-making and scale-up evidence-based governance. This includes better use of predictive analytics, more public engagement; and greater use of cutting-edge methods like machine learning.”
* “By explicitly incorpo¬rating innovation into the structure, goals and activities of the transition teams, the next administration can get a fast start in implementing policy goals and improving govern¬ment operations through innovation approaches.”
