I favor the general point here, but the leading anecdote doesn’t really fit with the lessons learned. A government organization generally does not need an innovation doctrine to avoid being outcompeted because they are a monopoly provider. They maintain that monopoly through force.
If you want to get a government agency to perform better, fix the incentives.
> A government organization generally does not need an innovation doctrine to avoid being outcompeted because they face no meaningful competition
Maybe true for some government organizations, but not true on the whole.
Governments spend billions (and sometimes trillions) on innovation to compete with each other. Collectively, government programs probably account for 99.99% of all "innovation" spending.
And they have the highest stakes when it comes to being "outcompeted".
I immediately thought of the government. I interned for the transportation department. I was one of these "innovation heros". It was a budget thing as explained to me. If I didn't have work to do, they told me to do homework, I wasn't even allowed to help people on things outside of my department, since they'd have to report on that in budgeting details and be accountable of it to the taxpayer.
Incentives matter, certainly, but you must suss out what those incentives are and what they need to be to arrive at the desired outcome. Look no further than the US Digital Service and 18F (within GSA). You are not paid top dollar, but you are put in front of meaningful work and enabled to deliver (although that in itself is an incentive for the practitioners recruited). From the bottom of the impact report I cite: "We need you. Let’s help millions of people together." right above the Call to Action to apply.
The USDS is enabled to succeed in this mission through the support of the Executive Office of the President, the equivalent of corporate executive sponsorship. Culture comes from the top.
> The USDS is enabled to succeed in this mission through the support of the Executive Office of the President, the equivalent of corporate executive sponsorship. Culture comes from the top.
That sentence is the essence of generic corpo-speak. Doesn't really mean anything without specifics.
Can you really imagine a military that didn't have and celebrate heroes?
If a large organization can't have those that sacrifice themselves and break rules to achieve the greater goal, then they're unlikely to succeed against a significant foe. At the same time communication within large organizations is challenging and leadership is unlikely to know what the challenges at the front line are. Fostering all innovation is as likely to lead to regularly scheduled mediocre "improvements" and "features" that nobody really wants in order to meet whatever metric is in place (to the detriment of what is not explicitly measured).
The argument of the article seems to be, just be so good and well directed by both senior and middle managers that exactly the "right" innovations occur within the process. That likely means those in the trenches aren't getting what they need.
The most effective rapid innovation method I've seen (though painful and challenging to implement) is having separate teams competing to several performance milestones (which allow more generic goals and targeted metrics). At the milestones they share their results and innovations, which competing teams can then use/combine to compete against them. Management needs real goals with known tradeoffs, 2-3x more people than a single team, and it's stressful hitting deadlines knowing that failure is an option. The failure mode is putting all the "best" people on one team which is supposed to win, though I've seen even that get broken by a team of underdog "heroes" who embarrassed the chosen team, and luckily senior management rewarded that.
It's similar to "red" vs "blue" pen-testing or wargaming, but you can have more than 2 teams and the goals can be aligned against the status quo (sometimes a tweaked current solution is the winner).
Doesn't the leading anecdote give an example of a (dis)incentive that needs fixing? That it takes 10 months and lots of head-banging and then you get a $100 bonus, that would certainly disincentivise me to do any type of innovation.
> All large organizations – both government and corporate—need an innovation doctrine or else risk being outpaced by competitors.
I don’t think the anecdote fits conclusion. The reasons to innovate are many, but being outcompeted is not that salient to, say, an IT person in some agency.
If you want to get a government agency to perform better, fix the incentives.