Open Innovation in the Public Sector – Challenge.Gov – Public Administration Review

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Ines Mergel and I have a paper accepted in Public Administration Review. 

Implementing Open Innovation in the Public Sector:
The Case of Challenge.Gov

As part of the Open Government Initiative (OGI), the Obama administration has called for new forms of collaboration with stakeholders to increase innovativeness of public service delivery. Federal managers can utilize Challenge.gov to crowdsource solutions from previously untapped problem solvers and leverage collective intelligence to tackle complex social and technical public management problems. We highlight the work conducted by the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at the General Services Administration (GSA), the administrator of the Challenge.gov platform. Specifically, we feature the work of Tammi Marcoullier, Program Manager, Challenge.gov, and Karen Trebon Deputy Program Manager for Challenge.gov, and their role as change agents mediating collaborative practices between policy makers and public agencies in navigating the political and legal challenges within their local agencies. We provide insights into the implementation process of crowdsourcing solutions for public management problems as well as lessons learned designing open innovation processes in the public sector.

National Science Foundation Grant – Hybrid Challenge Platforms to Promote Innovation

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NSF Along with my colleagues at Arizona State University, I have received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Hybrid Challenge Platforms to Promote Innovation

To be practical and sustainable tools for innovation, the coming generation of community-engagement and crowd-sourcing platforms need to improve the user experience of participants, while simultaneously providing a reliable mechanism for synthesizing participants' contributions into usable problem-solving outputs. In the present project, a multi-disciplinary research team will explore how community participation spreads, the effects of feedback on participation, and the changes in community and collaboration structure over time. Empirically, the project lays out three research questions: 1) characteristics of participatory government platforms, 2) behavioral and system challenges over time, and 3) the impact of managerial and design interventions on individual behaviors and network structure.

The specific platform for this research is "10,000 Solutions", a many-to-many system managed by Arizona State University that empowers both individuals and organizations to host and participate in solutions, challenges, and collective actions. The research team will study participation in "10,000 Solutions" across online, physical, and hybrid environments, particularly focusing on participant community building, trajectories of participation, and output usability. A diverse slate of experiments, with the application of the application of agent-based modeling and network analysis, will provide useful insights for theory development on community engagement and participation, as well as generating best-practice guidelines for participatory design, operation, assessment and implementation.

Future advances in economic growth and national security require new technologies for harnessing the wisdom of crowds and the power of public innovation. However, these technologies are still in their infancy, and there is a growing need for robust and flexible platforms that can move beyond exploratory efforts, toward real-world deployment. The project will develop evidence-based policies and practices to improve collaboration while increasing perceptions of accountability, legitimacy and individual satisfaction, the effectiveness of the work outputs and the adoption and use of the products developed by the community and through the platform. Knowing the conditions that increase and sustain collective action will help in devising policies and practices for building platforms to enhance participation in government and non-government organizations.

NSF Award [Link]

What Kind of a Consultant Are You?

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The-consultant3-1024x440My blog post on management consultants (Nov. 2010), was featured in the Summer Issue of the Management and Consulting Association's monthly strategy newsletter, The Consultant. 

Plenary Address at the Western Intergovernmental Audit Forum

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I will be delivering a plenary address at the 2013 Western Intergovernmental Audit Forum. The meeting will take place at the Tempe Mission Palms Hotel in Arizona, Sept 12-13, 2013. My talk titled, Emerging Technologies and the Future of Governance, will explore how technological innovations are changing how we design, implement, and manage, our governance mechanisms and public institutions. header

Two Papers in the JASIST Virtual Issue on Knowledge Management

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jasistIt has been a while since I wrote a paper on knowledge management systems, so it was a pleasant surprise hearing that the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology has chosen two of my papers for their virtual issue on knowledge management. The two papers are:

To read the editorial of the special issue, please click here. The special issue was edited by  Claire McInerney and Ziad Matni, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Conference on Economic Resilience, Braga, Portugal

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ConferenceEconomicsI am heading to Portugal for the Conference on Economic Resilience. I co-organized this event along with two colleagues, Isabel Ramos (University of Minho) and James R. Martin, II (Clemson University). The conference will be held at Largo do Paço – Rectorate. Attendees at the event include:

  • Norio Okada, Director of Disaster Recovery Governance Research Institute, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan
  • Alejandro Pinto-Gonzalez, DG CONNECT Policy Office, European Commission, Belgium
  • Helena Molin Valdes, Deputy Director UN-ISDR, Switzerland
  • Francis Ghesquiere, Manager for the World Bank’s Disaster Risk Management Practice Group and Head of GFDRR Secretariat
  • António Cunha, Rector of the University of Minho, Portugal
  • Alvaro Santos Pereira, Minister of Economy and Employment of Portugal

Designing, Planning, and Managing Resilient Cities

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To what disruptions must cities be resilient? How can cities, as complex systems, be resilient? Building a capacity for resilience might be a daunting task when one considers the multitude of components, processes, and interactions that take place within and beyond a city’s physical, logical (e.g. legal), and virtual (cyberspace) boundaries. Planning for resilience to the impacts of stressors within cities requires an evaluation of the vulnerable components of cities, an understanding of the key processes, procedures, and interactions that organize these components and develop the capacity to address various structuring of components and their interactions with the ultimate goal of achieving resilience.

I have co-authored a paper with Trevor Flanery (Urban Affairs and Planning, College of Architecture and Urban Studies, Virginia Tech) that provides a deeper look at resilience in cities, proposes a conceptual resilience framework, and includes a discussion and analysis of the framework. We propose a framework that serves as a holistic approach to designing, planning, and managing for resilience by including an evaluation of cultural and process dynamics within cities as well as their physical elements.

The paper will appear in Cities.

Intrapreneurship and the Public Sector – Article in PA Times

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PATimesI wrote a brief piece on intrapreneurship within the public sector for PA Times [Link]

Dr. Yukika Awazu, Bentley University

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002Congrats to Dr. Yukika Awazu. Dr. Awazu graduated from Bentley University on May 18, 2013 . Her committee was chaired by Sue Newell (Cammarata Professor of Management). M. Lynne Markus (The John W. Poduska, Sr. Professor of Information and Process Management) and I served as members of her committee. Dr. Awazu's thesis was titled Practicing Technology Implementation: The Case of an Enterprise System.