Innovation in the Federal Government

Abstract

The Federal Government is under increased pressure to modernize technologically antiquated systems as it continues to deliver more services amid a resource-constrained and risk-averse environment. Innovation has been identified as the pathway to modernization efforts essential to improving mission effectiveness and delivering efficiencies critical to optimizing current and future capabilities and services. The lack of a fact-driven framework prevents the necessary feedback to monitor and measure the return on investment (ROI) of modernization efforts, thereby hindering the delivery of effective, efficient government services. There are three attributes of leadership advocacy, psychological safety, and learning organizations that establish the cultural conditions to create change, cultivate transformation, and curate modernization of the Federal Government (Huber, 1991). This capstone maps the patent-pending process of collecting the inputs from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys (FEVS) to catalog and correlate the indicators derived from the Innovative Cultural Attributes (ICA), which inform the Innovative Conceptual Framework (ICF) from which to produce an Innovative Cultural Index (ICI) that illuminates an organization’s Innovative Cultural Capacity (ICC). This provides a means to monitor and measure the annual ICA at each agency to qualify their ICI and quantify their ICC. The scores represent the maturity of each cultural attribute, a critical indicator of the Federal Government's propensity to change, transform, and modernize. This ICF identifies the necessary expertise and experience needed to evaluate the ICI. The patent pending ICI provides insights into selecting, aligning, and embedding Presidential Innovation Fellows to serve as transformative catalysts that create the critical conditions to modernize the Federal Government. The current 2024 FEVS indicates that the Federal Government has a mid-range ICI, suggesting minimal cultural capacity to embrace transformative efforts to modernize. The federal surveys reveal that leadership advocacy attributes are the greatest gap in an organization's ability to create an environment conducive to strong psychological safety. This creates a pervasive fear of failure, which affects their propensity to become a learning organization, and in turn, precludes their ability to modernize, evolve, and optimize Federal Government capabilities and services. The results of their recent Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) are as follows:

66% Leadership Advocacy Attributes communicate / collaborate / create 74% Psychological Safety Attributes support / secure / safe 71 % Learning Organization Attributes think / try / test

The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program, formally established in 2017, to bring the transformative success of industry to foster an innovative culture to the Federal Government. PIFs are subject-matter experts with a proven track record of success in the civilian sector to cultivate sustainable innovation and are selected, aligned, and embedded to empower leadership to curate an environment conducive to change and transformation. These attributes are critical to establishing a learning organization that modernizes capabilities and evolves services for the American people.