What happens when you go to a meeting or a party and someone asks you what you do? “I’m a blah-blah” is usually followed by “That’s interesting” and then there’s small talk on the subject, right? When I respond “I help companies do Open Innovation”, what follows is ....silence.
But that may be coming to an end, because the U.S. Government is getting innovative.
I recently participated in Industry Day for Open Innovation, sponsored by the U.S. General Services Agency (GSA). The day was kicked off by Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. CTO. When I explain to someone what I do, (yes, it requires explanation), their response is “That is totally awesome”, if they entered the world after Heavy Metal music, and “Cool” if they can sing along to Fleetwood Mac. But can you imagine being the CTO of the U.S. Government? How cool is that?!?
And that is exactly my question: how cool is it that the US government is embracing “innovation”? For those of us who believe that innovation is the way of the future, it is extraordinary. NineSigma believes that partnering with our government creates an innovation bridge to bring technology, resources, transparency, and access to our federal system. Current innovation and crowdsourcing efforts in the Department of Education, NASA, and the Department of Energy are just the beginning.
But if the government is doing it, can it still be “awesome”? According to Urban Dictionary, “cool” is “the best way to say something is neat-o, awesome, or swell” but "awesome" is “the highest rank of 'cool'”. If the New York Times runs a weekly column on “innovation” and the U.S. government has a CTO, has “innovation” gone “mainstream”?
I certainly hope so.