Innovative State

by Aneesh Chopra

  Thanks in part to Michelle Obama, there are now Apps for Healthy Kids too. That was a contest I conceived with two Cabinet Secretaries, Tom Vilsack of Agriculture and Kathleen Sebelius of Health and Human Services, in March 2010. This was what Dwayne Spradlin would classify as a participation challenge, one most concerned about generating the most possible awareness for an issue; to do that, we tapped into the First Lady’s passion and celebrity. The prizes, funded by the public and private sectors, were modest, totaling $60,000 for a dozen winners, whose diversity and commitment would speak to our success. Their winning submissions ran the gamut from an online tool (Pick Chow!) aimed at childhood obesity to Trainer, a game in which players create creatures, moving them around an illustrated map to satisfy their dietary and fitness needs while exercising alongside with a web cam. The winners’ backgrounds and motives were varied, too: parents concerned about caring for a sick child, a student class at the University of Southern California, and even entrepreneurs who had quit jobs to start businesses based on what they had created.

  Sometimes, a challenge aimed at advancing social good can even lead to the birth of a new industry.

  In 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that his department’s Vehicle Technologies Program would expand its relationship with the active Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE competition by providing a $5.5 million grant for technical assistance.32 The competition was consistent with the program’s redeeming mission, to develop vehicle technologies and alternative fuels that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lessen America’s dependence on foreign oil, and help the U.S. transportation industry remain competitive.

  The prize itself was substantial, a total of $10 million raised privately, available to three teams—with $5 million to the winner—for the construction of safe cars that could achieve at least 100 MPGe (or the equivalents) in a real-world driving environment. To win the high-level prize for the mainstream class, a car needed to have four wheels, seat at least four passengers, and have a range of at least 200 miles. In this case, unlike the Apps for Healthy Kids challenge, the money mattered.

  Oliver Kuttner had first become interested in competitions when he was 10 years old, winning a physics prize that had been sponsored by a defense contractor and airplane company. This one had a significantly greater payoff. “If it wasn’t for the prize, we wouldn’t have really looked at it,” said Kuttner, a Virginia commercial real estate developer; race driver; and automobile dealer, collector, and builder.33 “When we studied it, we realized the conventional wisdom just wasn’t right, and there were real misconceptions. One was that if you do an electric car, you have a chance to win, otherwise you don’t.”

  With other competitors already several laps ahead, Kuttner had a need for speed. He swiftly assembled a team called Edison2, which set up in an abandoned textile factory in proximity to machine shops in Lynchburg. Kuttner leaned on the team’s experience in the racing world to produce results quickly and to recognize that weight and safety weren’t mutually exclusive. At 830 pounds, its four-passenger Very Light Car wasn’t much heavier than the average motorcycle. “When the car showed up, everyone laughed at it,” Kuttner said. “Then they figured out they couldn’t get within halfway of us on the consumption end.”

  For an initial $2.7 million outlay, including some assistance from investors, Edison2 not only captured the $5 million prize, but put itself on an inside track to pioneering the ultra-lightweight car industry. By the spring of 2012, it had spent an additional $8 million to continue developing and redesigning the vehicle in an attempt to bring the safest, most effective lightweight car to the mainstream market.

  “If a large car company decided to do this, I can guarantee they would not be where we are if they spent 10 times as much,” Kuttner said.

  He got a tailwind in 2012, when the federal government raised corporate average fuel economy standards, putting pressure on car manufacturers to innovate in order to achieve a near doubling of standards to 55 MPG by 2025.34 Word had spread of Kuttner’s ­initial—if, by his own admission, incomplete—achievement. So calls started coming in, with inquiries about the incorporation of some of his technology into other companies’ existing product lines, or even about the possibility of bringing to market some version of the Very Light Car itself. And, in 2013, he introduced an electric-powered version that he intended to take to market.

  Some social justice challenges hit closer to the heart.

  Such was the case for me, a father of two daughters, when I spent my 39th birthday alongside members of the President’s cabinet, for a meeting that Vice President Biden had convened to address sexual assault and dating violence against high school and college-aged women. Biden had long championed this issue, aware of the alarming statistics that nearly one in five college women will be victimized by sexual assault, and one in 10 teens will be hurt by someone they are dating. We set out not only to help prevent such attacks, by giving women improved tools to safely and discreetly communicate distress but also to help women better connect to resources in the aftermath of an assault. Biden and Secretary Sebelius launched Apps Against Abuse, challenging developers to create applications that make women less vulnerable.35

  Nancy Schwartzman learned of the challenge from a Twitter follower who had seen her 2009 documentary film, The Line, which featured footage of her confrontation with the acquaintance who had raped her. Schwartzman’s Twitter contact suggested that she compete as a means of complementing the film, which was screening on college campuses. She deemed that silly. “I’m a filmmaker,” she thought. “I don’t know how to make an app.”

  That was July. In late August, she e-mailed her colleague Deb Levine in California who had done text (SMS) work related to safe sex and HIV for youths, and they agreed to blend that technical expertise with Levine’s access to young people. Schwartzman knew, from all her outreach, that college students tended to stay inside their bubbles and networks, eschewing assistance from off-­campus services, including law enforcement. She also knew students would only use an application that spoke their language and acknowledged their lifestyles, which meant she needed to solicit their input, make it simple, and avoid any judgmental features. College students party off campus. They often drink, and sometimes lose their bearings. The point wasn’t to stop such activities, but to make students as safe as possible in any situation. Nor did she want the application to appear threatening, with an alarm or a danger icon, because—as she was advised by a domestic violence survivor during a crowdsourcing stop at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse—that might alert and anger a snooping, abusive partner.

  Working with a designer that Schwartzman had used for her film work and an engineer to write the code, the team worked up to the competition deadline. Her team worked pro bono, Schwartzman characterizing the exercise as “a perfect coming together of people who want to make a difference.” Their concept was Circle of 6, a casual, social, gender-neutral application that appears as an attractive, but still inconspicuous, icon on a smartphone, one that allows users to choose six trusted friends for their circle—and then, by tapping the phone twice, send a preprogrammed SMS alert message with an exact location or request an interrupting phone call. It also allows users to call two preprogrammed national hotlines or a local emergency number of their choice.

  On November 1, 2011, Vice President Biden announced that Circle of 6 was a cowinner of the Apps Against Abuse Challenge, calling it “a new line of defense” for young people against violence in their lives. That validation, and the subsequent interest and excitement, convinced the Circle of 6 team to go beyond the competition, and get the product in as many hands as possible. Even with a small grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a small investment from Motorola Mobility, and a rousing reception at the CTIA Wireless Convention, they found financial resources scarce. True to her documentary filmmaking background, Schwartzman kept scrapping. She managed to get a tiny mentio
n in Cosmopolitan magazine, which led to thousands of downloads before the product’s official launch.

  Schwartzman has received testimonials from female college students around the nation—including one at Cornell who had been fearful due to reports of a guy groping girls around the dark, vast campus; and another at Duke who now feels more comfortable studying late at the library. She’s heard from women who use the call-me function to excuse themselves from creepy dates, from young professionals in cities who use the GPS capability to get picked up in unfamiliar neighborhoods. She’s heard from massage therapists and house cleaners who use it just to let people know where they’re working. Schwartzman heard from families who put their grandparents on Circle of 6 so they know the latter’s whereabouts, which she thinks is “really adorable,” and parents who do the same for their teenage children when the latter start driving (“so there’s no question that they’ll come get their kids anytime, anyplace”).

  “It’s becoming a care network for each other,” Schwartzman said.

  Not just in America either. While presenting at the United Nations, Schwartzman fielded requests for translations to countless languages.

  “The GPS is international, we have two hotlines built in, and one is customizable,” she said. “If you are in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, England, or Germany, these are all the places we’ve heard that are using the app.”

  The global impact became clearest to Schwartzman in 2012. After the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern in New Delhi, India, Schwartzman began to notice a spike in downloads from that region, from a few hundred to several thousand, making it the second-largest market for the app behind the United States.36 To assist those users, she launched a New Delhi version in April 2013, one translated into Hindi and able to provide local hotlines and resources. She even enlisted a Bollywood superstar, John Abraham, as a celebrity endorser.

  In the fall of 2013, Circle of 6 crossed a milestone: 100,000 downloads. And Schwartzman wasn’t stopping, working on a version for Mexico City officials. Through Tech 4 Good LLC, she is working with her team to make the app a commercial enterprise.

  All of the above represented progress in problem solving, by thinking in ways big and small, but mostly smart. That was the aspirational vision that President Obama had articulated, after he first bridged the few blocks between the White House and the National Academy of Sciences in April 2009. President Obama used that stage to call for a fresh approach toward confronting America’s most confounding quandaries. He invoked one of his greatest predecessors, the one who used the Civil War as an opportunity to innovate, not stagnate. “Lincoln refused to accept that our nation’s sole purpose was mere survival,” President Obama said. “He created this academy, founded the land grant colleges, and began the work of the transcontinental railroad, believing that we must add—and I quote—‘the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery . . . of new and useful things.’ This is America’s story. Even in the hardest times, against the toughest odds, we’ve never given in to pessimism; we’ve never surrendered our fates to chance; we have endured; we have worked hard; we sought out new frontiers.”

  Today, we need to explore new frontiers not only in terms of the problems we try to solve but in the manner in which we attempt to solve them. Collectively and creatively. Much more is possible, if the government makes the populace part of the process, so the greatest number of people can assemble and share their ideas and gifts for the greater good.

  As Obama put it, “I think all of you understand it will take far more than the work of government. It will take all of us. It will take all of you.”

  Tom Kalil certainly understood that, as he continued taking steps to scale and cement prize policy throughout the government, including his February 2012 recruitment of the chief operating officer of The X PRIZE Foundation, Cristin Dorgelo, to join the administration. Together, they would champion the already-bustling Challenge.gov platform. Over the first three years since its start in 2010, that platform hosted roughly 200 competitions that were sponsored by more than 40 federal agencies—with those agencies receiving design and execution support from the new NASA Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. The Challenge.gov program itself won Harvard’s prestigious Ash Center Innovations in Government Award in 2014.37

  But this isn’t just about milestones already achieved and accolades already earned. The real power of prize policy is where it can take us.

  “You change people’s views of what is possible,” Kalil said. “If I said to you a couple of years ago, California is going to pass legislation to create a legal framework for self-driving cars, you might have looked at me like I was crazy, right?”

  That, however, is what’s happening. Aiming to get soldiers out of harm’s way, DARPA issued a series of Grand Challenges starting in 2004, with a Grand Challenge defined by Kalil as, “Ambitious yet achievable goals that capture the public’s imagination and that require innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology to achieve.”38

  This one called for the replacement of one-third of America’s ground fleet with autonomous vehicles by 2015. In the first trials, none of the robot vehicles completed the 150-mile route alongside Interstate 15 from Barstow, California, to the Nevada border. In 2005, DARPA ran a do-over, on an even more winding, mountainous, turn-heavy course. Twenty-two of the 23 entered vehicles went farther than any of the vehicles the years before, and five completed the course, paced by Professor Sebastian Thrun’s Stanford Racing Team and its Stanley vehicle. Google later hired the Stanford talent to further demonstrate the vehicle’s safety, and the company’s subsequent breakthroughs compelled California Governor Jerry Brown to sign SB 1298 into law in October 2012, allowing for testing of Google’s self-driving cars on the road, with a human passenger along as a safety measure.39 Cadillac, a division of General Motors, has predicted it will be manufacturing fully autonomous cars by the end of the decade.

  Imagine that. Or software that replicates the personalized approach of a premier tutor. Or green buildings that produce all the energy they consume. Or increasing access to health care for pregnant women in the developing world by at least 50 percent. Or making solar cells as cheap as paint.40 Those were among the lofty long-term ambitions that the President outlined in his Strategy for American Innovation.41 That report inspired an interim measure, the SunShot initative to make solar cells as cheap as coal by 2020. That Grand Challenge inspired a prize competition, the $10 million Race to the Rooftops challenge, with an even more tightly defined goal. The windfall prize goes to the first team to install solar panels across 5,000 rooftop systems, at $1 per watt—as measured by the nonhardware costs of permitting, interconnection, and inspection.

  When that prize is awarded, we’ll all win.

  Chapter 8

  Lean (Government) Startups

  George Patton had already gone above and beyond for his country by the breakout of the Second World War. In World War I, he had commanded the United States tank school in France and earned full colonel status, the Distinguished Service Medal for excellence in performing duties of high responsibility, and the Distinguished Service Cross for exceptional bravery in combat—bravery that included taking a bullet through the thigh while advancing on the enemy.

  In the two decades following America’s victory, Patton continued rising through the U.S. Army ranks, even as the nation resumed a peacetime posture. In the summer of 1939, with Adolf Hitler’s Germany already acting as an aggressor in Europe, and Asia falling into turmoil, Patton was called to serve as a tank brigade commander in the Second Armored Division, based in Fort Benning, Georgia. There had been advancements in technology in the intermittent years, but those were not reflected in the fleet Patton found at Fort Benning. Due to military underinvestment after World War I, 85 percent of the machinery in the Army’s arsenals was over 10 years old, this at a time of rapid technological change
. And some parts were just plain missing. A Life magazine article reported in 1942 that “once, on his own responsibility, Patton bought some quickly-needed equipment direct from Sears, Roebuck.” Yes, on his own time, and dime.1

  Obviously, ordering from Sears, Roebuck wasn’t an ideal approach to preparing for the full-scale war that appeared well on its way. In his fireside chat on May 26, 1940, titled “On National Defense,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt assured the nation that its military was steeling and reshaping itself for conflict, leaning “on the latest that the brains on science can conceive” when it came to weaponry and tactics.2 Unlike other nations, America would not manage nationalized industries and centrally plan production; rather, the government would search for the best ways to work with its private domestic partners.

  While he acknowledged in the speech that private industry, not government, would need to manufacture the majority of “the implements of war,” he emphasized that government stood ready to provide investment capital for new plants and plant expansions, employee hiring, and any other capacity-building activities to meet the wildly ambitious production goals the military had set. But the government would also need the private sector’s assistance, especially in a coordination capacity, since few government employees had the requisite experience and expertise, whether in product and service creation or in mass production techniques. So he enlisted private sector experts to align with the government, and entrusted them to take the coordination lead, for a common cause.

  “Patriotic Americans of proven merit and of unquestioned ability in their special fields are coming to Washington to help the Government with their training, their experience and their capability,” Roosevelt said. “It is our purpose not only to speed up production but to increase the total facilities of the nation in such a way that they can be further enlarged to meet emergencies of the future.”