A little less conversation, a little more Obama (vis-à-vis Government Innovation)

When it comes to talking about innovation, Obama is not particularly articulate. And yet…and yet his tenure as president has seen huge changes in how the U.S. government approaches innovation. This week’s readings vary from the pre-Obama spring of 2008 with Michele Jolin’s article “Innovating the White House”, to a screed mid-Obama in 2013 by Michelle Malkin entitled “Obama’s ‘Social Innovation’ Slush Fund” in the National Review, to a later-mid-Obama piece in 2014 in the New York Times by Laura D’Andrea Tyson and Jonathan Greenblatt called “Opportunity for All and Social Innovation: Obama’s Policy Agenda.” Each article takes as granted that the federal government, optimistically or negatively or positively, is a rather unwieldy apparatus while failing to notice that it’s no accident that these innovative practices (or abuses of power in Malkin’s view) came during the Obama (or “the next president” in Jolin’s view) administration.

My takeaway from the readings is that they each fail to realize (or anticipate) changes within the government that allow the government to be a more creative source for social innovation. Malkin may be the closest to the truth in saying the old system of federal allocation is no good at the new system of resource allocation (and far from the truth in just about everything else). One of Obama’s perhaps greatest accomplishments regarding innovation is that he’s changed the system. He’s innovated/innovating the federal government, which then better allocates resources and policy.

The piece by Tyson and Greenblatt is the closest to getting it. They point out Obama’s early creation of the White House Office of Innovation and Civic Participation, the Social Innovation Fund, and Pay for Success. They don’t note the creation of the U.S. Digital Service, 18F (both digital consultancies within federal departments), and the Innovation Fellows Program. They don’t get into his administration’s work on the backend of budgeting and procurement. Eight years later, we have a more agile government from which to provide and fund services. It’s still very much a work in progress, but Obama is decades ahead of these authors in thinking about innovation. They might be asking for (or diatribing against) the feds’ use of a new model of funding, but they’re stuck in variations of the old model.

Per this week’s topic, an innovative government will yield innovative policies and solutions. A question going forward is how much else can the government structure be innovated? Is the government only good for dishing out resources or can it be a platform aiding and begetting innovation and social impact (and without dictating the terms)? A key takeaway is that part of Obama’s legacy should be how he didn’t just talk innovation but managed it, leaving us with a government moving in the right direction towards being better at implementing the ideas, processes, and policies that are driving better, more socially-impactful innovation.