DTT on Government Innovation

This afternoon, I eagerly e-opened an e-book that appeared in my RSS feed from DTT on government innovation, The Public Innovator's Playbook: Nurturing Bold Ideas in Government. In an age when fiscal policy is expanding tremendously in an effort to stimulate the private sector, I thought it would be nice to learn how the government could nurture innovation. Additionally, the CCP always seems to be trying to find some way to foster innovation in China, and I thought there might be something in the book relevant to China.

A few paragraphs into the book it was clear that the topic was not about the government fostering innovation that would spread to the marketplace, but how to nurture innovation within government departments to develop novel approaches for solving governance problems. The topic proved interesting, the reading proved easy, and I had a few hours to kill before corporate taxation.

The part that proved most interesting to me was how the government could successfully develop new ideas in the "suffocating grip of bureaucracy." Here is how the book frames the question:

Bureaucratic structures developed to enforce compliance with rules and procedures can kill budding ideas because innovations often require challenging the status quo or questioning long-held assumptions that may have worked well in the past. Without loosening the sometimes suffocating grip of bureaucracy over the more creative employees, it will be difficult to motivate them to innovate. This means dismantling or bypassing structures and systems that ensure conformity and stifle creativity, and building new structures that encourage fresh thinking.

The answer is to use safe havens. There are three examples of safe havens:

• Pilot Programs. Pilot programs allow "employees the time to develop emerging ideas and protects them from short-term budget constraints and premature criticism."
• Skunk Works. "Skunk works are composed of a small group of highly talented and motivated people who are freed from bureaucracy, paper work, and most routine administrative responsibilities." Many of us are familiar with the original private sector Skunk Works. And, the book also points to the Manhattan Project as a sort of skunk works on steroids.
• Intrapreneurs. "A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation." Examples include Google and 3M, where employees are allowed to spend almost 20% of their time developing business ideas. An example in the government includes the creating of self-supporting business units within the US Forest Service used to deliver services to forest managers.

How Does China Stack Up?
China stacks up pretty well. If you remember from my post on the Central Party School (CPS), one of the CPS functions is as a skunk works, and the CCP then tests several of the ideas generated in pilot programs across the country. Intrapreneurship seems to be a lot less common.

The book directly discusses China twice, and both are presented as positive examples of innovation within the government. The first example is an early success that China had in replicating bold ideas in government from village to village:

Replicating an idea from one locality to another local context also requires managing stakeholders who want to preserve the status quo. In 1978, in response to Deng Xiaoping’s new aphorism “to get rich is glorious,” several local cadres in a small village in east China secretly got together to split farming land across households and privatize the right to use and derive profit from it. When they learned what the farmers were doing, however, party leaders objected. Deng intervened, prevailing on the party leadership to legalize and approve the
initiative, actively promote the replication of the model, and accept the replacement of people’s communes by village governments. The results of this experiment were documented and paved the way for the Household Production Responsibility System. By 1984 this family-based model covered 99 percent of Chinese villages; agricultural output increased by 8.2 percent annually from 1980 to 1985, with half of the increase attributed to growth in productivity.

The other example of success in China was in making the government an attractive place to work, a problem that has not been solved in the US where prospective employees who want a career in public service prefer NPOs to the government:

Mobility across jobs, projects, and teams stimulates commitment from employees. The Chinese government provides considerable flexibility to new recruits in selecting jobs that match their career plans and needs. It invests in improving competencies within its young talent pool through training and even temporary leadership positions in public agencies.

I guess the other half of the G2 might have something to learn from China.