That first phase, live for a full week, attracted more than 35,000 participants. Some of the requests weren’t quite what we expected: the legalization of marijuana, access to Area 51 files on alien life forms, and the disclosure of the President’s birth certificate, to name a few. Still, we managed to distill more than 900 ideas into 16 discrete topics worthy of further exploration. The second phase of Noveck’s consultation invited public comment on blog posts elaborating on each of the 16 ideas. All told, she would surface more than 1,000 comments over more than two weeks. That would feed into a third phase: Noveck handing the pen to the American people. Using a wiki tool that offered a bit more structure on collaborative editing, we fielded 300 drafts of specific, actionable language.10
That all led to December 8, 2009, when I joined Vivek Kundra in unveiling the Open Government Directive, informed by many of the public-generated recommendations. The White House Communications team allowed me to introduce the directive live, via the Whitehouse.gov site. It was 11 a.m. on a workday, so I wasn’t sure the broadcast would be viewed by many. Still, I was anxious, so anxious that I forgot my opening lines. The camera “red light” began to flash. I began to speak. My mind began to race. What am I supposed to say next? Can I get a do-over? This is . . . live! I began to laugh. And laugh. And I couldn’t stop laughing.
For what seemed an eternity, I stumbled through the opening segment, pausing just long enough to let Kundra take the lead. For the remaining 45 minutes, I would recover enough to emphasize the key points of the directive. We were ushering in a new era of openness across the federal government, which included an insistence on the publication of government data in machine-readable, accessible form. We would execute near-term milestones to demonstrate tangible results, with the White House directing cabinet agencies to publish three “high value” data sets on Data.gov. We would be requiring government agencies to foster an ongoing culture of openness, which included the publication of open government plans, with clear milestones to hold leaders accountable.
Few, if any, White House reporters covered the event. Only a few blogs are so deeply committed to government transparency that they had it on their calendars. In fact, it might have gone unnoticed, if not for my flubs, which amused someone on the ever-vigilant research staff of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
“Today, at the White House, it was hilarious!” Stewart said, during his opening bit. He played the clip of my endless, uncontrolled cackling, and ended with a quip that has followed me ever since: “What is so funny, Indian George Clooney?”
At the time, it didn’t seem so funny. I actually thought the President might fire me. But I would survive, and even come to appreciate the attention: there are worse things than being compared to international movie stars. Plus, my wife, Rohini, really didn’t mind the nickname.
The open government movement had gotten off to a flying start in the Obama administration, but we recognized that it was only one element of what needed to occur. The fate of the economy was still up in the air, and the administration’s assistance could not, and did not, cease with the Recovery Act.
Neither could mine. In fact, many of my priorities centered on creating more enabling ingredients for long-term, sustainable job growth. Those included initiatives to clear the path for entrepreneurs in the heavily regulated sectors of energy, health care, and education in particular; to encourage Internet commerce by strengthening privacy and security; and to double the capacity of mobile broadband across the country. And those specific initiatives became part of a larger effort, one constructed with my colleagues at the National Economic Council and called the Strategy for American Innovation.11
On September 21, 2009, I boarded Air Force One for the first time, to accompany the President to Hudson Valley Community College. The school was attended largely by adults, who sought the skills associated with the jobs and industries of the future, particularly in health care and clean energy. The future was squarely on President Obama’s mind, even as he dealt with the immediate pressures of the acute economic recession; he wanted to do whatever he could to avert such circumstances again. So, in his address, he offered a vision for an economy without bubbles, one established on a firmer foundation than rampant financial speculation and over-leveraged consumer spending, one in which prosperity would be paved by skilled, productive workers leveraging public investments in the building blocks of innovation. Traditionally, as we outlined earlier in the book, government’s infrastructure investment had been related to building roadways, railways, and runways. In the President’s conception of an innovation economy, that notion of infrastructure would be broadened to include R&D; human capital, especially training in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines; and digital infrastructure such as ubiquitous broadband access.
To transition ideas from the lab to the marketplace, the President called for new rules of the road, including technology-based reforms to expedite the patent approval process, which would allow for the introduction of more new products and services; streamlining regulations for new companies seeking to raise capital for growth; and instituting a new framework for global cooperation in the Internet economy through an emphasis on voluntary, enforceable codes of conduct to protect privacy and secure data. Ideally, sound public investments and market rules would spark the private sector to scale innovations throughout the economy, creating new jobs and industries and lifting incomes across an ever-growing middle class.
The President’s vision even offered a path forward in solving some of the most seemingly intractable problems facing the country—bending the health care cost curve while improving quality; transitioning to cleaner sources of energy; personalizing the learning system so every child could compete. Calling for an all-hands-on-deck approach to catalyze breakthroughs in these national priorities, the President spoke of a renewed spirit of collaboration among the public and private sectors; companies big, small, and new; citizen innovators, corporate labs, and the nation’s leading research universities.12
Now we had a strategy. But we were missing an action plan. For that we needed to collaborate with business leaders from across the private sector. We needed some unusual, unexpected coalitions to emerge, in the name of shared progress. As noted in the prologue, we had gained some experience in this exercise in January 2010, when we gathered fifty of the most successful CEOs across a diverse set of industries for the White House Forum on Modernizing Government, to share their secrets for streamlining operations in a way that we could attempt to replicate in the federal government. At that gathering, President Obama gave a brief address, in which he called on them “to help us build the kind of government that the American people expect and the kind of government that they deserve—and that’s one that spends their money wisely, serves their interests well, and is fully worthy of their trust and their respect.” That meeting would result in several executive actions to close the IT gap between the public and private sectors, including initiatives to spur the use of cloud computing and mobile technologies in the name of improving access to citizen services.13
By December 2010, it was time to summon business leaders for another conversation. We congregated at the Blair House, right across from the White House, a place more commonly known as a site for housing and entertaining world leaders. This summit would require increased engagement from all parties, including the President, since even more was at stake. It was strictly about the economy, which was still slogging along at a pace that comforted no one, not with unemployment still above nine percent. This event came amid a great deal of noise, mainly from the Washington press corps, which had been harping incessantly and incorrectly on the President’s difficulty in connecting productively with the business community, with some dismissing the meeting as a “photo op.”14 In reality, no photos were taken. No lobbyists were allowed. None but a handful of administration staff could participate. And no members of the press secured an invitat
ion, with access restricted to a formal statement and some post-event interviews.
Rather, this was a “collaboration op,” with the President seeking to strengthen the handshake between the public and private sectors to benefit the American people. For more than four hours, he spoke with—not at—twenty of the nation’s leading CEOs, including those from General Electric, Comcast, Xerox, and Pepsi, on a broad range of topics, dedicating a full hour to ideas that would spark innovation and entrepreneurship. The day was split into five discussions, each of which would begin with opening remarks from two of the CEOs, followed by an intensive round of debate and dialogue facilitated by the President himself. The few staffers involved took on the role of transcribers, capturing the key points and ensuring we had an effective follow-through plan. Many of the CEOs later publicly reported, through a variety of media outlets, that they were pleasantly surprised and largely impressed.
Contrary to the widely held perception of Washington, D.C., as a place where nothing ever gets done, we collectively accomplished plenty in three key areas:
1) On patent reform, the President brokered a handshake commitment between the CEOs of Eli Lilly and Cisco, companies from two sectors—pharmaceuticals and technology—that had been at odds on the issue but were inching closer. They agreed to work together over the next 30 days to produce a compromise. With that secured, the President could move forward. In 2011, he would sign into law the America Invents Act which, among other things, reduced the time to earn a patent decision by 40 percent, thus enabling innovators to focus on job creation and growth rather than bureaucracy and litigation.15
2) On startups, Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr cited a research study that demonstrated the large proportion of job creation occurs after a company goes public, but that recent regulatory changes, including Sarbanes-Oxley, had the unintended effect of increasing the burdens of going public. The implication was clear—fewer initial public offerings meant fewer jobs. Could we better balance the need for regulation and disclosure with the economic benefits of more IPOs? In response, the President challenged his Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, to follow up this meeting by convening a broad set of stakeholders for the development of consensus recommendations to remove capital access barriers. This would ultimately lead to a component of the 2012 JOBS Act: extending the amount of time that a company had to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, thus reducing the company’s costs. This essentially created an IPO on-ramp, which several high-profile companies used the following year. That included Twitter, which raised $1.82 billion when it went public on November 7, 2013.16
3) On innovation, the President heard a presentation at the Blair House from Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, about the importance of wireless broadband to the economy, as well as about the exploding growth in mobile device usage. America had already led in the Internet economy—AOL through the dial-up era and firms such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter dominating in the broadband era. Now those firms were transitioning to a more competitive market for applications and services in this new era of smartphones and tablets.
Would these firms, and others from America, hold their own against innovators from China, Japan, Korea, and other present and future digital powerhouses, countries that had taken a more active role in preparing for mobile broadband? Details on this topic were discussed at a CTO meeting the following day. The resulting details led to the design of a National Wireless Initiative the President would announce in his 2011 State of the Union address and sign into law by February 2012. The new initiative would authorize the use of “incentive auctions” to create a private market for spectrum (the use of airwaves to transmit information like television, radio, and the Internet), thus ensuring the cell phone industry would have the resources necessary to minimize dropped calls and maximize mobile economic benefits. It would also fund the last remaining request of the 9/11 Commission—to ensure first responders had access to communications systems that interacted with one another, reducing the risk of unnecessary harm on account of errant or incomplete information. And it would invest in R&D to make it more likely that the next generation of mobile computing would be invented in the United States rather than abroad. Better yet, it would contribute billions toward deficit reduction.17
Some of the technology leaders who participated in the productive Blair House meeting—and helped shape the subsequent policy initiatives—lent their expertise in other areas. Eric Schmidt was one such contributor, serving as an adviser to the President on his Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST).18 He would join his fellow PCAST members in drawing attention to the importance and opportunity associated with “Big Data,” the catchphrase that acknowledges the exponential growth in digital information related to everything we do, from social networking to advanced manufacturing. Their recommendation to the President was for each federal agency to conceive and execute a “Big Data” strategy.19 In March 2012, the President announced that six agencies, including the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, were making $200 million in new commitments related to improving the tools and techniques needed to access, organize, and understand “huge volumes of digital data.” As the strategy evolved, the President would more explicitly link the Big Data initiatives to national priorities, including economic growth, improving health and education, and stimulating clean energy.20
Through these and other measures, we were progressing toward an innovation economy, which had been among my core assignments as Chief Technology Officer.
In early 2012, I informed the President that I would be leaving the administration to run for office in Virginia, as part of a longer-term vision to implement a more innovative government in a state that, at Jamestown in 1607, had served as the birthplace of American democracy.
Weeks prior to my departure, the President invited my family to the Oval Office, where he entertained my wife and two daughters with tales of the design touches that he and Michelle had added. Then he turned his attention to me, thanking me for my service, expressing enthusiasm for my upcoming political campaign, and outlining my final assignment. He wanted me to produce a memo that not only summarized what occurred during my tenure but also organized some of the core tenets in a way that the work could outlast not only my time in office, but his as well.
That homework was in keeping with the nickname (“Chief Memo Officer”) that my wife had given me during my tenure, as she watched me draft countless policy ideas and options for my White House colleagues. I framed the assignment in the form of a playbook, one that distilled complex concepts into a format that was simple to understand, with guidelines and principles to assist my successor, as well as the growing numbers of CTOs across federal agencies and at state and local levels.21
I had a head start, not just from my experiences inside government, but from the lessons learned during my parallel exploration of the private sector, where many of the principles not only had their origins, but had shown sustainability in their success. In fact, some could be directly traced to the professor Henry Chesbrough—with whom, in the fall of 2011, I had shared a lengthy lunch prior to speaking to his class at the Haas Business School at the University of California-Berkeley. Chesbrough had long been hailed as the godfather of “open innovation,” which he had defined in his first of several books as “a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.” Inside the Obama administration, I had been championing a public sector version inspired by what I knew of his private sector work, and I had been attempting to institutionalize that offshoot as part of the federal government culture. At our lunch, I explained not only how we had implemented some of those “open innovation” ideas, but how I viewed the roles of the private sector in connecting with our government work: as a contributor, a beneficiary, or a collaborator.
First, the priva
te sector could extend the arm of government, helping us deliver services closer and closer, and faster and faster, to the place and time that citizens needed them. Second, the private sector could take a handoff from government, taking information that the public sector had previously collected for its own purposes and using it to create new commercial products and services, such as the multibillion-dollar weather industry. Third, in certain circumstances, we could join hands and remove barriers to improvements in areas of paramount importance to the American people, such as health care and education.
Throughout the rest of this book, I will further flesh out the elements that animate these three private sector roles in solving public problems. But at the outset, let’s explore the origins of the private sector’s use of open innovation.
According to Chesbrough, open innovation was the offshoot of a series of management innovations designed to strengthen U.S. competitiveness.
In the 1960s, Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford Motor Company who had become the Secretary of Defense, brought the concept of “systems analysis,” the allocation of priorities and resources across projects based on total costs and benefits, from the Ford factories into the Defense Department. In the 1970s, the soaring success of NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon surfaced innovations in program management to better identify the critical path toward completing a project and how to make the necessary adjustments when the most important activities along that path fell behind schedule. In the 1980s, the Japanese model for total quality management found American academic champions in W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran. That led to very intricate processes such as Six Sigma, which was attributable largely to Motorola, and relied upon specialized teams that targeted the reduction of defects, variability, and waste.
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