How to Fuel Government Innovation That Lasts

When Facebook was founded in 2004, its motto was “move fast and break things.” Ten years later, it introduced a new slogan: “move fast with stable infrastructure.” Facebook, like most places with a bureaucracy scaled to the size of its user base, had realized the benefit of innovation that’s less showy and more stable.

Government, by contrast, has known this lesson for quite a while. In particular, most innovation in the local and state government space, rather than being fast and flashy, is slow and small. The reason for this? It’s an approach that actually works.

In government, the innovation that produces the best results often comes from small but impactful strategies, like changing the color of traffic citations, putting death and birth certificates online, and using Google Sheets to coordinate infrastructure projects. These may seem like minor changes, but for the cities and states that implement them, they can be part of an effective strategy that makes government more responsive to the needs of its constituents. When such minor adjustments accumulate, we, as a society, start to see a wholesale shift in the way local governments design their services, so that they can be more human-centered, efficient, and sustainable.

So how can we get more government practitioners, from the city level up through federal agencies, to engage in and embrace the practice of slow innovation?

The first step of this process involves education. We need government practitioners at all levels to be aware of not only the vast array of innovation work available to them, but also their individual capacity to initiate change. As the recreation services director for the city of Seattle said in a recent interview, “Sometimes we forget what we have control over … Innovation is a choice.” His words underscore one of the major lessons of the growing public interest technology field: Innovation doesn’t have to be done by people who identify as designers or technologists. The best ideas often come from the people doing the hard work of government service day in and day out, because they have a robust knowledge of how their systems work—including their faults. Starting small allows for a greater amount of experimentation, the chance to pivot if things aren’t working well, and the ability to create a proof of concept for future projects.

Starting small may also make it easier for innovative ideas to move across geographies. New America, for instance, has experimented with telling the story of promising government innovations, as well as with providing the coordination to help these innovations take root in new places. Consider Tempe, Arizona, and Northern Kentucky, both of which participated in our Opioid Mapping Initiative, which is aimed at connecting local governments grappling with the opioid epidemic. On a monthly web call, Tempe presented its overdose data dashboard and explained how it’s using it to target services to people in need. By the next monthly call, Northern Kentucky had created its own, nearly identical dashboard with data from its community. Collaborations like these can be sources of inspiration and pathways for new and innovative problem-solving strategies to migrate.

Collaborations have also been successful between cities of varying sizes and resource levels. When New York City, which has a Service Design Studio dedicated to empowering innovation within its city government, announced that it would host office hours for any government across the country to call in with its innovation questions, every slot was filled almost immediately. By offering to help others, well-resourced cities like New York are making sure that innovation isn’t limited to coastal “smart cities.” Indeed, government practitioners all across the country can contribute to this work, and they’ll find a wealth of information to assist them once they start the process.

In addition, as the work of government innovation begins to spread and scale, it’d be useful to create infrastructure to support this work in the long term. Innovation teams like the one in New York are incredibly effective for cities that have the capacity to build them, but they aren’t the only option. Infrastructure in a smaller city or state may look like procedural changes to the policymaking process that don’t require full innovation teams. Governments don’t have to do this alone—they can look to others for guidance. New York City has a publicly available tools and tactics kit; the city of Austin, Texas, runs an online forum and evolving resource list called the Civic Innovation Community of Practice; and New America’s own publication on government innovation, The Commons, shares stories of government innovation successes and failures.

By integrating strategies learned from sources like human-centered design and user testing—both of which are used to center the voices of citizens in any changes to government services—local governments can build a culture of innovation among all government practitioners before making larger investments in new departments.

“Start slow and small” may not be nearly as sexy of a tag line as “move fast and break things,” but for governments working to solve big public problems, it’s an approach that can lead to tangible results, energized public servants, and a better-served citizenry. And, at its core, that’s what innovation should be about.