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

Abstract

As part of the Open Government Initiative, the Barack Obama administration has called for new forms of collaboration with stakeholders to increase the innovativeness of public service delivery. Federal managers are employing a new policy instrument called http://Challenge.gov to implement open innovation concepts invented in the private sector to crowdsource solutions from previously untapped problem solvers and to leverage collective intelligence to tackle complex social and technical public management problems. The authors highlight the work conducted by the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at the General Services Administration, the administrator of the http://Challenge.gov platform. Specifically, this Administrative Profile features the work of Tammi Marcoullier, program manager for http://Challenge.gov, and Karen Trebon, deputy program manager, and their role as change agents who mediate collaborative practices between policy makers and public agencies as they navigate the political and legal environments of their local agencies. The profile provides insights into the implementation process of crowdsourcing solutions for public management problems, as well as lessons learned for designing open innovation processes in the public sector.

Barriers to open e-learning in public administrations

“…(Janssen, 2012;von Lucke & Geiger, 2010;Mergel & Desouza, 2013). Often, the objective is to see how open data provided by the government can supply OERs (Campbell, 2015) or lead to citizen innovations (Mergel & Desouza, 2013). Interestingly, no publication takes the reverse perspective and asks how open e-learning and resources can benefit public sector employees.…”

“…The following sections will elaborate on the main concepts and their interactions (see Figure 1). (Janssen, 2012;von Lucke & Geiger, 2010;Mergel & Desouza, 2013). Often, the objective is to see how open data provided by the government can supply OERs (Campbell, 2015) or lead to citizen innovations (Mergel & Desouza, 2013).…”

Open collaboration in the public sector: The case of social coding on GitHub

“…Open collaboration crowdsourcing ap proaches are supported by technology and occur in iterative processes similar to collaborative innovation creation (see for example: Sørensen and Torfing (2012)). Other open collaboration approaches in clude the provision of micro tasks known as citizen science (Gustetic et al, 2015), or co development of solutions for public management problems through open innovation contests such as on the open inno vation platform Challenge.gov (Mergel & Desouza, 2013). These can re sult in the reuse of public sector information in mobile phone apps (Luna Reyes, Bertot, & Mellouli, 2014).…”

Shedding Light on Participation in Open Government Arenas: Determinants of Platform Activity of Web and App Users

“…reporting potholes) and to make suggestions for improvements [34,37,42,60]. Knowledge about the motivation of individuals who participate in this new service mode can contribute to improve platform effectiveness and increase participation [33,38]. Despite some promising efforts to understand the patterns of communication between administration and citizens by leveraging modern technology as well as citizens motivations for doing so [52,58] we still lack systematic approaches including multiple factors (e.g., digital divide, citizens attitudes toward technology, differences among channels).…”