Two key factors to innovation success in the public sector

According to a recent Fast Company article, the U.S. government has an image problem. The article suggests that the public sector fails to showcase its own work, and needs to embark on a “charm offensive” to win back faith in government-related innovation.  

As someone who has lived in both worlds, witnessing many first-of moments in government and private sector applied research and development, this strikes me as an interesting take, but potentially misguided.  

While I concede that many people probably don’t know that the platforms we use every day to communicate, navigate and search have their origins in U.S. government research and development, I’m not sure that showing or telling more people more frequently would help.  

Doing new things is hard, subject to high degrees of uncertainty, and often nurtured by a small collection of people. It’s the ability to focus on a goal that most don’t share using methods that most disagree with that creates the most impactful innovation. Why is Gmail so ubiquitous even though most executives at Google thought it was a bad idea in its early days? Why do we have a platform for antibody detection at DARPA today that predates the urgency of COVID-19 by almost 4 years? Why was the U.S. Air Force able to update a plane’s software while in flight for the first time ever and via the cloud when 90+% of commercial enterprise IT is still trying to find a path to the cloud?   

Innovation success in the public sector will generally come down to these two factors (among others): sponsorship (aka, air cover) and a small group of people with true passion for the problem. You can see this in action today, whether that’s in the work of the Defense Digital Service, U.S. Air Force, DARPA, or any of the thousands of teams that are making tomorrow’s technology a reality, despite some of the most austere conditions.  

Teams aren’t succeeding because they won the hearts and minds of the masses. They are succeeding because small numbers of incredibly inspirational leaders are leveraging the pull of the mission to gather small groups of fellow travelers, and in many cases, simply giving them the space to try, fail, learn, and try again.  

So, more than waging brand image campaigns touting that innovation is actually happening, let’s make missions more visible to those innovators who are likely to answer the call to public service.