We mentioned recently that the White House Innovation Fellows had been announced and were starting work on Blue Button and other projects. I wanted to highlight several other projects in this initiative, which hopes to leverage the creativity and innovation of outsiders to develop new and different solutions to government challenges.
One of the open data projects is with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which endeavors to make the US investment in international development much more effective and transparent, and focuses on country-driven approaches. MCC is also working to develop a new strategic and technology plan for their site, and we’re excited to see how that effort is supplemented by the work of Innovation Fellow Dmitry Kachaev.
Clay Johnson, an Innovation Fellow who formerly worked with the Dean Campaign and the Sunlight Foundation, is working on RFP-EZ, which seeks to make it much easier for small, high-growth companies to work with the federal government.
These projects are very much in the spirit of the work of one of our founding organizations, InnoCentive, which opens up the problems to completely new groups of “solvers” with the belief that they may come up with previously unimagined solutions that will work dramatically better. We’re excited to see the results of this pilot program, and we’re hoping that it’ll be the start of an exciting new phase of innovation in government.
