Washington: 21stSeptember 2009

The US Executive Office of the President, the National Economic Council (NEC) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) have published a Strategy for American innovation: driving towards sustainable growth and quality jobs.

Under the heading PROMOTE COMPETITIVE MARKETS THAT SPUR PRODUCTIVE

ENTREPRENEURSHIP, D. Improve Public Sector Innovation and Support Community Innovation the strategy states (pages 17 and 18):

Innovation must occur within all levels of society, including the government and civil society. The Obama Administration is committed to increasing the ability of government to promote and harness innovation. The Administration is encouraging departments and agencies to experiment with new technologies that have the potential to increase efficiency and reduce expenditures, such as cloud computing. The Federal government should take advantage of the expertise and insight of people both inside and outside the Federal government, use high-risk, high-reward policy tools such as prizes and challenges to solve tough problems, support the broad adoption of community solutions that work, and form high-impact collaborations with researchers, the private sector, and civil society.

• Make the government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. On his first day in office, the President signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, thereby placing government accountability and civic engagement at the forefront of the Administration’s governing philosophy. The President’s Memorandum urged agencies to promote three principles for bringing innovation to government: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Transparency promotes accountability by providing citizens with information about what their Government is doing. Public participation in decision-making strengthens democracy and ensures that Government makes policies with the benefit of information that is widely dispersed in society. Collaboration improves the effectiveness of Government by encouraging cooperation and knowledge-sharing within the Federal Government, across levels of Government and between the Government and private institutions.

• Promote Open Government. The Administration created the White House Open Government Initiative to coordinate Open Government policy, projects, and design technology platforms that foster openness across the Executive branch. The Initiative has achieved many important milestones, including:
  • Publishing government data online to make it easy for anyone to remix and reuse, thus involving the American people in the development of public policy
  • Challenging thousands of Federal employees to propose ideas for slashing the time required to process veterans’ disability benefits
  • Releasing information on Executive branch personnel and salaries, and
  • Launching the IT dashboard, a one-stop clearinghouse of information that allows anyone with a web browser to track government spending on technology and hold the government accountable.

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