> So, the question is: What’s next? How do leaders in government think about and organize innovation in a way that makes a difference? The answer here for me i

> So, the question is: What’s next? How do leaders in government think about and organize innovation in a way that makes a difference? The answer here for me is to create a culture of experimentation and hypothesis testing whose results can be rapidly incorporated into the operations of the agency. Allow for testing off the critical path. Allow for smaller-scale experimentation to prove a concept that has an on-ramp into your day-to-day operations This works for technology approaches, this works for regulatory approaches - it even works for opt-in citizen services IF you create the framework that supports it. (Director signs paper saying citizens can opt-in to test practices and those that do have X rights in the normal process, get the language cleared by legal, and you've got something that can last for a bunch of use cases) Reduce the burden to get something started at a low level when your staff know it's a better way. Continue to reach out to line employees to ask what they would like to try out / attempt to make the organization better. So much of government stagnation is the sheer burden of getting any sort of experiment approved / blessed, so you miss out on what's already in the building, let alone what can be gotten from outside. Maybe what I'm describing is "lean enterprise" type stuff. As for Why Government Isn't a Startup and the original premise. Well... why isn't IBM a bigger version of a startup? Imagine dealing with all of the cruft ever written by congress since the formation of the country as your basis for operation. :)