Innovative State

by Aneesh Chopra

  On November 7, 2011, President Obama announced the launch of the Veterans Job Bank, a Google-customized search engine—built at no cost to the taxpayer in collaboration with the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs—that any veteran could use to find the tagged jobs that were right for them, including the ability to narrow results based on military occupation code or ZIP code.41 On that day, several job listings vendors, including Monster.com, Simply Hired, and LinkedIn, publicly pledged to adopt the schema.org standard if they had not already done so. Simply Hired, for example, had already kept track of nearly 500,000 open jobs associated with veteran hiring commitments and all of them were tagged on day one. Within a year, the job listings sites would feature more than one million veteran-tagged jobs, and shortly after that, Google would devote a day to highlighting the Veterans Job Bank on its most precious asset, the search home page.

  The next step in this process was bringing the Job Bank to veterans, rather than forcing them to find it on a government website. Several technology firms volunteered to build free apps to help connect veterans with the Bank, with the reward of being honored at the Joining Forces Veterans App Showcase, featuring Dr. Jill Biden, the Vice President’s wife. Originally, Twilio was not among those participating firms. Yet, upon learning about the event just one day earlier, the San Francisco cloud communications company thought it could contribute. Its CEO, Jeff Lawson, issued a “lightning challenge” to his more than 75,000 partner developers to build a more veteran-friendly interface to search for these tagged jobs, accessible on smart phones and using their technology.42 He set the deadline for 8 a.m., Pacific time, the following morning, five hours before the event.

  Tony Webster, a 25-year-old web developer, just happened to be on Twitter when the challenge crossed his feed. He had been interested in open government for a while and, although he had never served in the military, had close friends who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. He had heard horror stories about their job searches due, in part, to the reluctance of employers—for one reason or ­another—to hire veterans. Further, he had a good understanding of Twilio. So he headed to a café, intent to expeditiously create something unique before its doors closed at midnight. “I wasn’t about to be up all night, because I actually had a real job, too,” Webster said. “I whipped up something in four hours. Then I went home, ramped it up, and got some sleep.”

  His conception of HeroJobs.org wowed the Twilio judges by flipping the model. After entering their Military Occupation Specialty codes and ZIP codes, veterans received text messages, every morning, with the appropriate, veteran-committed openings in their area. Webster had no idea whether anyone would actually use HeroJobs.org, but many veterans did, and veterans’ relatives told him they appreciated the ease of the service.

  His application was designed just for the competition, not as a full-running site, and eventually it faded out. So, too, did many of the demonstrated apps in the showcase. But firms like Google and LinkedIn have further invested in making their applications work with the former’s launch of VetNet, a portal that accesses and builds valuable services, such as networking courses and Google Hangout video discussions, on top of the jobs bank. LinkedIn would develop its own veterans page, and a discount offer for those users—a free LinkedIn premium account (a $99 value), plus a more direct path for employers to connect with the 1 million veterans already on the LinkedIn platform.

  Common to all these examples is the notion of a more innovative state. That starts with smart government, government that identifies problems, convenes the interested parties and innovative thinkers, and then empowers them to address an issue. It is one of the initiatives that, for those that follow, will set a rather high standard.

  Chapter 7

  Prizes and Challenges

  In 1861, with the Civil War starting to rage on sea as well as land, the Union found itself in very rough waters. Its strategists knew that its antiquated wooden boats were no match for the Confederacy’s more modern, sturdier ironclad ships.1 And they knew that, if they didn’t upgrade their own fleet, they were sunk. That’s why the Navy engaged in a procurement process, selecting three designs for further development, including one from John Ericsson. At the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862, Ericsson’s USS Monitor managed an important draw against the Confederate battleship Virginia, at least temporarily preserving the Union blockade of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

  Following that modest success, President Abraham Lincoln and the Navy expanded the ironclad fleet in early 1863. But with increasing use, the Navy discovered that the vessels had a key defect: the magnetism of the iron siding interfered with compass tracking, skewing navigation so significantly that even the most capable captains often steered the ships the wrong way.

  Thankfully, President Lincoln had a new vehicle to help steer them back. Starting with Benjamin Franklin’s foundation of the American Philosophical Society (APS) in 1743, there had been many calls for, and attempts at, creating a national society of science, through which ready, willing, and able experts would pool their talents to tackle the nation’s most pressing and seemingly intractable problems.2 That effort gained some momentum in the 1850s, through the work of a group of influential, yet self-deprecating scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts (calling themselves the Scientific Lazzaroni after an Italian bakery). But it was the Civil War that made such collaborative exploration really imperative, since the military began to recognize the value of scientific advice in evaluating new inventions to aid the war effort. In 1863, as he was assessing the ironclad problem, President Lincoln signed into law a unanimous act of Congress to establish the nonprofit, independent National Academy of Sciences (NAS), for work on an assortment of challenges during the conflict at hand and—assuming the Union endured—the decades to come.3

  Fifty scientists signed up for the cause, receiving no compensation. A subset of them got to work on the Navy’s ironclad assignment. The results were impressive enough that President Obama spoke of them in a 2013 speech marking the 150th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences. “By the next year, they were inspecting the Union’s ironclads and installing an array of bar magnets around the compasses to correct their navigation,” Obama told the audience. “So right off the bat, you guys were really useful. In fact, it’s fair to say we might not be here had you not. Certainly I would not be here.”

  That line drew laughter, but the story of the National Academy’s founding is fodder for a serious conversation about problem solving, specifically the need for the government to be open, flexible, imaginative, and even courageous. Consider the stakes for Lincoln: he was in the midst of a conflict that could have entirely wiped out a young country. Yet, after the traditional problem-solving process went awry—with a contractor developing flawed ironclads—he adjusted, turning such a critical endeavor over to a startup with no track record. Reckless? Not really. In that case, Lincoln and Congress had drawn upon our most underutilized resource, our diverse talent in the private sector, widening the net to include the perspectives that might otherwise have been unknown or ignored, since our government has relied upon the same narrow cast of contractors, often choosing those who best know how to curry favor in the Beltway. In the instance of the ironclads, Lincoln and Congress drew upon prestige and public service as the primary motivators for time-limited participation; too often since, our government has defaulted to an external dedicated employee base which, by its nature, means greater costs.

  Simply, we haven’t truly learned enough of a lesson from history, so we keep repeating the counterproductive parts.

  In so doing, our government has gotten bigger, more bloated, and not necessarily better. Its modern acquisition culture—accepting of exorbitant costs and lengthy delays, rarely considering novel alternatives, and leaving itself no way out—is best embodied by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and the Department of Defense’s ongoing, embarrassing attempts to get it in the air.4 In 1996, the
Pentagon conceived the F-35 as a radar-evading jet that would represent the pearl of the American armed forces air fleet. It contracted defense powerhouse Lockheed Martin to build roughly 2,500 jets at a cost in the $50–$60 million range apiece, for a total of roughly $125–$150 billion. Initially, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the jets were supposed to be introduced in 2008, with a full rate of production by 2012.5 Trouble with software testing, development, and integration led to numerous delays, and the projected cost of the aircraft had more than doubled by 2013, with the GAO reporting that tests to “evaluate the combat effectiveness and suitability of the aircraft in an operationally realistic environment” would not commence until 2017 or be completed until 2019, 26 years after the original contract. The total cost of roughly $400 ­billion—including nearly $2 billion for fixing errors uncovered in testing—would make it the most expensive government project in U.S. history, even with Lockheed Martin scheduled to deliver about 300 fewer planes than originally promised.

  This is where our procurement strategy has been taking us. Norm Augustine, an aerospace businessman and former undersecretary of the Army, saw it coming. In 1983, he quipped that, at the current exponential rate of aircraft inflation, the cost of a single combat plane would not only exceed the department’s entire budget by 2054, but would need to be shared by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Absurd, right? In 2010, The Economist checked the numbers for a progress report.6 This time, no jokes. “We are right on target,” Augustine said of his dire prediction. “Unfortunately nothing has changed.”

  Contract spending and inflation pressures are modern realities, not just in the Department of Defense for its complex weapons systems but also in a broader set of agencies that require information systems integration and related organizational support to address everyday concerns such as affordable housing, small-business lending, and public safety measures. The Obama administration has prioritized reining in contract spending, after the Bush administration had intentionally increased it through its philosophy of outsourcing more day-to-day services to the private sector. In fiscal year 2010, the federal government achieved the first year-over-year reduction in contract spending since 1997, down from $550 billion to $535 billion, partly through canceling overdue information technology contracts at several agencies (including Homeland Security, Justice, and Treasury) and asking agencies to pool software resources. In the fiscal year 2012, contract spending was down to $516 billion.

  Still, that was more than double what it was in fiscal year 2001. Such an enormous figure would typically provoke a spirited, even rancorous debate about government size and waste, regardless of whether the public or private sector was providing the work. It might even spark a discussion about scope: perhaps the government should get out of certain market areas on account of the related budgetary strain. Those are worthy conversations, but they shouldn’t be the only ones, especially in an era when new easier-to-adopt technologies enable the government to explore alternate avenues. If the emphasis in problem solving is on “how,” rather than simply “how big” or “how much,” we might have a chance to achieve quicker, better, and, in some cases, cheaper solutions. There will always be a place for traditional acquisition methods, through which a government identifies a need, translates it into a set of requirements, and then selects a vendor with the lowest, technically acceptable bid.

  But we need to make room for others.

  Where can we find them?

  In our history. In a bookstore.

  Often, brainstorming leads to a better way to solve big problems. On the odd occasion, browsing can.

  While working in the Clinton administration, as the Deputy Assistant to the President for Technology and Economic Policy, Tom Kalil stumbled upon Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. The best-selling book chronicled the overlooked efforts of John Harrison, an obscure eighteenth-century clockmaker, in assisting the British government to address the most vexing nautical issue of that time: the inability to accurately determine longitude while at sea, with the solution eluding the most illustrious thinkers of the era, including Sir Isaac Newton.7

  This limitation led to numerous lost or wrecked ships, and to many lost lives, even before the grounding of four of Rear-­Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s ships off the Isles of Scilly in 1707, and killing roughly 2,000 sailors. That tragedy, however, provided the impetus for the Longitude Act of 1714 and its creation of the Board of Longitude, which included Newton, and which established rather substantial financial rewards for introducing methods that determined longitude within varying distances—the top prize of £20,000 was equivalent to nearly $3 million today. In opposition to the conventional thinking of scientists and engineers, Harrison, then just 21, invented a watchlike device known as the chronometer. The device was initially too expensive for widespread use, and the Board of Longitude never awarded the top prize to Harrison, though it did give smaller prizes to him and at least nine others for their minor discoveries to aid the cause. It also incrementally funded some of Harrison’s continuing efforts, as did Parliament, and his work on the device until his death in 1776 set the stage for costs to come down considerably in the nineteenth century and for the chronometer to become the preferred method for measuring longitude.

  Learning of Harrison’s long-ago, somewhat slow-motion triumph energized Tom Kalil to start charting a new course in modern policy making.

  “I call prizes an old idea whose time has come again,” Kalil said.

  Kalil’s evangelism was based on the modern reality, best expressed by Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”8 It was also based on economic austerity, since incentive prizes are awarded only to successful solutions and on simplicity, with the competition process designed to stimulate rather than stifle ambition.

  Kalil asked the National Academy of Engineering to organize a workshopping event in April 1999 that attracted the former Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, to speak on the importance of challenges and prizes.9 It also attracted representatives of various government agencies, including one of its most innovative, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), founded by President Eisenhower in 1958 with a one-page memo in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. DARPA was made responsible for preventing future technology-based surprises in defense, as well as for developing surprises of America’s own. Over the decades, DARPA had drawn upon those they believed to be the best and brightest scientific and technical minds throughout the country. But the agency recognized that prizes may uncover untapped talent in often-­unrelated areas. So DARPA worked with Kalil and the Congress to pass legislation to give it authority for prizes. Kalil left government for academia in 2001, but DARPA’s experimentation in this area would continue, as one of the government’s leading proponents of prize policy throughout the George W. Bush administration and beyond.

  While advising the Chancellor of the University of ­California-Berkeley and chairing the Clinton Global Initiative, Kalil continued advocating for challenges and prizes through position papers and op-eds, declaring this as “an idea that people of both parties should rally behind,” due to its ability to leverage the prize purse and, after finding a winner, attract further investment in a field. Yet, for most of the Bush administration, the government’s use of prizes was modest, limited to DARPA, NASA, and the Department of Energy.

  The private sector was another story. There, the prize movement was taking off, thanks largely due to Peter Diamandis. While growing up in New York, Diamandis had a fascination with space and flight, winning a rocket design competition at age 12. Even after earning his medical degree, he continued exploring space-related opportunities—from communications to transport—as an entrepreneur. In his 30s, a reading of Charles Lindbergh’s autobiographical The Spirit of St. Louis
encouraged him to get his pilot’s license, while also introducing him to the role that “the extraordinary prize stuff” played in the role of the commercial aviation industry. That book related how Raymond Orteig, a New York hotel owner, issued a 1919 challenge to aviators to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. Nine teams spent more than $400,000 in competition for Orteig’s $25,000 prize. Lindbergh, then a 25-year-old mail pilot, pulled off the transatlantic feat.

  If Lindbergh had applied for a government grant, his proposal probably would not have survived the peer review process, given the skepticism about his undertaking. Instead, Lindbergh merely needed to convince himself that he could cover the costs and summon the guts. He explained his daring by wondering, rhetorically, “What kind of man would live where there is no danger?”

  This frame of thinking appealed to Diamandis, himself a dreamer and doer who found inspiration for his endeavors not only in ­history —such as the Apollo missions—but from science fiction. “My mission and purpose in life was to explore a new frontier,” Diamandis said. “The Star Trek universe painted a picture of a world of abundance, powered by technology. It offered to us, in our visioneering, a model of what the future could be like.”

  In 1996, Diamandis announced the first X PRIZE in St. Louis. He based it on the Orteig Prize, and made entrance exceedingly appealing, by securing a $10 million donation from entrepreneurs Amir and Anousheh Ansari. The award would go to the first private team that constructed a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, twice within two weeks. In response, 26 teams from seven countries, collectively spending more than $100 million in development work, with Scaled Composites, from Mojave, California, winning in 2004 for a vessel called SpaceShipOne (SS1).10 Better still, the entrants’ remarkable progress toward a proof of concept stimulated the imagination of countless others who hadn’t been part of the competition. That, as Kalil noted, served to launch something else: “The big win was not that someone got a prize, but that Richard Branson and others said, hey, space is not just for governments anymore. There can be a vibrant commercial space industry.” That industry has since exceeded $1.5 billion in public and private funding.