Workplace innovation in the public sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eurofound: “Innovative organisational practices in the workplace, which aim to make best use of human capital, are traditionally associated with the private sector. The nature of the public sector activities makes it more difficult to identify these types of internal innovation in publicly funded organisations.

It is widely thought that public sector organisations are neither dynamic nor creative and are typified by a high degree of inertia. Yet the necessity of innovation ought not to be dismissed. The public sector represents a quarter of total EU employment, and it is of critical importance as a provider and regulator of services. Improving how it performs has a knock-on effect not only for private sector growth but also for citizens’ satisfaction. Ultimately, this improves governance itself.

So how can innovative organisation practices help in dealing with the challenges faced by the public sector? Eurofound, as part of a project on workplace innovation in European companies, carried out case studies of both private and public sector organisations. The findings show a number of interesting practices and processes used.

Employee participation

The case studies from the public sector, some of which are described below, demonstrate the central role of employee participation in the implementation of workplace innovation and its impacts on organisation and employees. They indicate that innovative practices have resulted in enhanced organisational performance and quality of working life.

It is widely thought that changes in the public sector are initiated as a response to government policies. This is often true, but workplace innovation may also be introduced as a result of well-designed initiatives driven by external pressures (such as the need for a more competitive public service) or internal pressures (such as a need to update the skills map to better serve the public).

Case study findings

The state-owned Lithuanian energy company Lietuvos Energijos Gamyba (140 KB PDF) encourages employee participation by providing a structured framework for all employees to propose improvements. This has required a change in managerial approach and has spread a sense of ownership horizontally and vertically in the company. The Polish public transport company Jarosław City Transport (191 KB PDF), when faced with serious financial stability challenges, as well as implementing operational changes, set up ways for employees’ voices to be heard, which enabled a contributory dialogue and strengthened partnerships. Consultation, development of mutual trust, and common involvement ensured an effective combination of top-down and bottom-up initiatives.

The Lithuanian Post, AB Lietuvos Pastas (136 KB PDF) experienced a major organisation transformation in 2010 to improve efficiency and quality of service. Through a programme of ‘Loyalty day’ monthly visits, both top and middle management of the central administration visit any part of the company and work with colleagues in other units. Under budgetary pressure to ‘earn their money’, the Danish Vej and Park Bornholm (142 KB PDF) construction services in roads, parks and forests had to find innovative solutions to deal with a merger and privatisation. Their intervention had the characteristics of workplace partnership with a new set of organisational values set from the bottom up. Self-managing teams are essential for the operation of the company.

The world of education has provided new structures that provide better outcomes for students. The South West University of Bulgaria (214 KB PDF) also operates small self-managing teams responsible for employee scheduling. Weekly round-tables encourage participation in collectively finding solutions, creating a more effective environment in which to respond to the competitive demands of education provision.

In Poland, an initiative by the Pomeranian Library (185 KB PDF) improved employee–management dialogue and communication through increased participation. The initiative is a response to the new frameworks for open access to knowledge for users, with the library mirroring the user experience through its own work practices.

Through new dialogue, government advisory bodies have also developed employee-led improvement. Breaking away from a traditional hierarchy is considered important in achieving a more flexible work organisation. Under considerable pressure, the top-heavy management of the British Geological Survey (89 KB PDF) now operates a flexible matrix that promotes innovative and entrepreneurial ways of working. And in Germany, Niersverband (138 KB PDF), a publicly owned water-management company innovated through training, learning, reflection partnerships and workplace partnerships. New occupational profiles were developed to meet external demands. Based on dialogue concerning workplace experiences and competences, employees acquired new qualifications that allowed the company to be more competitive.

In the Funen Village Museum in Odense, Denmark, (143 KB PDF) innovation came about at the request of staff looking for more flexibility in how they work. Formerly most of their work was maintenance tasks, but now they can now engage more with visitors. Control of schedules has moved to the team rather than being the responsibility of a single manager. As a result, museum employees are now hosts as well as craftspeople. They no longer feel ‘forgotten’ and are happier in their work….(More)”

The report Workplace innovation in European companies provides a full analysis of the case studies.

The 51 case studies and the  list of companies (PDF 119 KB) the case studies are based on are available for download.

Regulatory Transformations: An Introduction

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Chapter by Bettina Lange and Fiona Haines in the book Regulatory Transformations: “Regulation is no longer the prerogative of either states or markets. Increasingly citizens in association with businesses catalyse regulation which marks the rise of a social sphere in regulation. Around the world, in San Francisco, Melbourne, Munich and Mexico City, citizens have sought to transform how and to what end economic transactions are conducted. For instance, ‘carrot mob’ initiatives use positive economic incentives, not provided by a state legal system, but by a collective of civil society actors in order to change business behaviour. In contrast to ‘negative’ consumer boycotts, ‘carrotmob’ events use ‘buycotts’. They harness competition between businesses as the lever for changing how and for what purpose business transactions are conducted. Through new social media ‘carrotmobs’ mobilize groups of citizens to purchase goods at a particular time in a specific shop. The business that promises to spend the greatest percentage of its takings on, for instance, environmental improvements, such as switching to a supplier of renewable energy, will be selected for an organized shopping spree and financially benefit from the extra income it receives from the ‘carrot mob’ event.’Carrot mob’ campaigns chime with other fundamental challenges to conventional economic activity, such as the shared use of consumer goods through citizens collective consumption which questions traditional conceptions of private property….(More; Other Chapters)”

 

From Stalemate to Solutions

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Karen Abrams Gerber & Andrea Jacobs  at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “….We waste time asking, “How can we change the way people think?” when we should be asking, “How do we change the way we do things?”

Changing how we do things isn’t just about reworking laws, policies, and systems; it means rethinking the very act of problem-solving. We believe there are five basic tenets to successful collaboration:

  1. Engaging unlikely bedfellows
  2. Creating a resonant vision
  3. Cultivating relationships
  4. Communicating across worldviews
  5. Committing to ongoing learning

Over the past two years, we’ve researched an organization that embodies all of these: Convergence Center for Policy Resolution “convenes people and groups with conflicting views to build trust, identify solutions, and form alliances for action on critical national issues.” Its projects include reimagining K-12 education, addressing economic mobility and poverty, reforming the federal budget process, financing long-term care, and improving the dietary choices and wellness of Americans.

The organization’s unique approach to collaboration enables adversaries to work together and develop breakthrough solutions. It starts with targeting and framing an issue, and then enrolling a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Over an extended period of time, these stakeholders attend a series of expertly facilitated meetings to explore the issue and identify solutions, and finally take joint action….

Foundational to Convergence’s success is the principle of engaging unlikely bedfellows. Stakeholder diversity helps eliminate the “echo chamber” effect (also described by Witter and Mikulsky) created when like-minded groups talk only with one another. The organization vets potential stakeholders to determine their capacity for working with the tensions and complexities of diverse perspectives and their willingness to participate in an emergent process, believing that each ideological camp holds a crucial piece of the puzzle and that the tension of differing views actually creates better solutions.

Convergence exemplifies the power of creating a resonant vision in its approach to tackling big social issues. Framing the issue in a way that galvanizes all stakeholders takes tremendous time, energy, and skill. For example, when the organization decided to focus on addressing K-12 education in the United States, it engaged in hundreds of interviews to identify the best way to frame the project. While everyone agreed the system did not serve the needs of many students, they had difficulty finding consensus about how to move forward. One stakeholder commented that the current system was based on a 19th-century factory model that could never meet the needs of 21st-century students. This comment sparked a new narrative that excited stakeholders across the ideological spectrum: “reimagining education for the 21st century!”

It’s important to note that Convergence focuses on framing the problem, not formulating the solution(s). Rather, it believes the solution emerges through the process of authentic collaboration. This differs significantly from an advocacy-based approach, in which a group agrees on a solution and then mobilizes as much support for that solution as possible. As a result, solutions created through Convergence’s collaborative approach are better able to weather the resistance that all change efforts face, because some of that resistance is built into the process.

Change takes time, and so does cultivating relationships. In an article last year, Jane Wei-Skillern, David Ehrlichman, and David Sawyer wrote, “The single most important factor behind all successful collaborations is trust-based relationships among participants.”…..

Change is complex and certainly not linear. Convergence’s approach “lives” this complexity and uncertainty. In its own words, the organization is “building the ship while sailing it.” Its success is due in part to actively and simultaneously engaging each of the five tenets of authentic collaboration, and its work demonstrates the powerful possibilities of authentic collaboration at a time when partisan rancor and stalemate feel inevitable. It proves we can change the world—collaboratively—without anyone relinquishing their core values….(More)”

The Open Data Barometer (3rd edition)

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The Open Data Barometer: “Once the preserve of academics and statisticians, data has become a development cause embraced by everyone from grassroots activists to the UN Secretary-General. There’s now a clear understanding that we need robust data to drive democracy and development — and a lot of it.

Last year, the world agreed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — seventeen global commitments that set an ambitious agenda to end poverty, fight inequality and tackle climate change by 2030. Recognising that good data is essential to the success of the SDGs, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the International Open Data Charter were launched as the SDGs were unveiled. These alliances mean the “data revolution” now has over 100 champions willing to fight for it. Meanwhile, Africa adopted the African Data Consensus — a roadmap to improving data standards and availability in a region that has notoriously struggled to capture even basic information such as birth registration.

But while much has been made of the need for bigger and better data to power the SDGs, this year’s Barometer follows the lead set by the International Open Data Charter by focusing on how much of this data will be openly available to the public.

Open data is essential to building accountable and effective institutions, and to ensuring public access to information — both goals of SDG 16. It is also essential for meaningful monitoring of progress on all 169 SDG targets. Yet the promise and possibilities offered by opening up data to journalists, human rights defenders, parliamentarians, and citizens at large go far beyond even these….

At a glance, here are this year’s key findings on the state of open data around the world:

    • Open data is entering the mainstream.The majority of the countries in the survey (55%) now have an open data initiative in place and a national data catalogue providing access to datasets available for re-use. Moreover, new open data initiatives are getting underway or are promised for the near future in a number of countries, including Ecuador, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Nepal, Thailand, Botswana, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda. Demand is high: civil society and the tech community are using government data in 93% of countries surveyed, even in countries where that data is not yet fully open.
    • Despite this, there’s been little to no progress on the number of truly open datasets around the world.Even with the rapid spread of open government data plans and policies, too much critical data remains locked in government filing cabinets. For example, only two countries publish acceptable detailed open public spending data. Of all 1,380 government datasets surveyed, almost 90% are still closed — roughly the same as in the last edition of the Open Data Barometer (when only 130 out of 1,290 datasets, or 10%, were open). What is more, much of the approximately 10% of data that meets the open definition is of poor quality, making it difficult for potential data users to access, process and work with it effectively.
    • “Open-washing” is jeopardising progress. Many governments have advertised their open data policies as a way to burnish their democratic and transparent credentials. But open data, while extremely important, is just one component of a responsive and accountable government. Open data initiatives cannot be effective if not supported by a culture of openness where citizens are encouraged to ask questions and engage, and supported by a legal framework. Disturbingly, in this edition we saw a backslide on freedom of information, transparency, accountability, and privacy indicators in some countries. Until all these factors are in place, open data cannot be a true SDG accelerator.
    • Implementation and resourcing are the weakest links.Progress on the Barometer’s implementation and impact indicators has stalled or even gone into reverse in some cases. Open data can result in net savings for the public purse, but getting individual ministries to allocate the budget and staff needed to publish their data is often an uphill battle, and investment in building user capacity (both inside and outside of government) is scarce. Open data is not yet entrenched in law or policy, and the legal frameworks supporting most open data initiatives are weak. This is a symptom of the tendency of governments to view open data as a fad or experiment with little to no long-term strategy behind its implementation. This results in haphazard implementation, weak demand and limited impact.
    • The gap between data haves and have-nots needs urgent attention.Twenty-six of the top 30 countries in the ranking are high-income countries. Half of open datasets in our study are found in just the top 10 OECD countries, while almost none are in African countries. As the UN pointed out last year, such gaps could create “a whole new inequality frontier” if allowed to persist. Open data champions in several developing countries have launched fledgling initiatives, but too often those good open data intentions are not adequately resourced, resulting in weak momentum and limited success.
    • Governments at the top of the Barometer are being challenged by a new generation of open data adopters. Traditional open data stalwarts such as the USA and UK have seen their rate of progress on open data slow, signalling that new political will and momentum may be needed as more difficult elements of open data are tackled. Fortunately, a new generation of open data adopters, including France, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, South Korea and the Philippines, are starting to challenge the ranking leaders and are adopting a leadership attitude in their respective regions. The International Open Data Charter could be an important vehicle to sustain and increase momentum in challenger countries, while also stimulating renewed energy in traditional open data leaders….(More)”

A New Dark Age Looms

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William B. Gail in the New York Times: “Imagine a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.

To comprehend how this could occur, picture yourself in our grandchildren’s time, a century hence. Significant global warming has occurred, as scientists predicted. Nature’s longstanding, repeatable patterns — relied on for millenniums by humanity to plan everything from infrastructure to agriculture — are no longer so reliable. Cycles that have been largely unwavering during modern human history are disrupted by substantial changes in temperature and precipitation….

Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress. Early cultures kept track of nature’s ebb and flow, passing improved knowledge about hunting and agriculture to each new generation. Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors.

But as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.

The list of possible disruptions is long and alarming. We could see changes to the prevalence of crop and human pests, like locust plagues set off by drought conditions; forest fire frequency; the dynamics of the predator-prey food chain; the identification and productivity of reliably arable land, and the predictability of agriculture output.

Historians of the next century will grasp the importance of this decline in our ability to predict the future. They may mark the coming decades of this century as the period during which humanity, despite rapid technological and scientific advances, achieved “peak knowledge” about the planet it occupies. They will note that many decades may pass before society again attains the same level.

One exception to this pattern-based knowledge is the weather, whose underlying physics governs how the atmosphere moves and adjusts. Because we understand the physics, we can replicate the atmosphere with computer models. Monitoring by weather stations and satellites provides the starting point for the models, which compute a forecast for how the weather will evolve. Today, forecast accuracy based on such models is generally good out to a week, sometimes even two.

But farmers need to think a season or more ahead. So do infrastructure planners as they design new energy and water systems. It may be feasible to develop the science and make the observations necessary to forecast weather a month or even a season in advance. We are also coming to understand enough of the physics to make useful global and regional climate projections a decade or more ahead.

The intermediate time period is our big challenge. Without substantial scientific breakthroughs, we will remain reliant on pattern-based methods for time periods between a month and a decade. … Our best knowledge is built on what we have seen in the past, like how fish populations respond to El Niño’s cycle. Climate change will further undermine our already limited ability to make these predictions. Anticipating ocean resources from one year to the next will become harder.

Civilization’s understanding of Earth has expanded enormously in recent decades, making humanity safer and more prosperous. As the patterns that we have come to expect are disrupted by warming temperatures, we will face huge challenges feeding a growing population and prospering within our planet’s finite resources. New developments in science offer our best hope for keeping up, but this is by no means guaranteed….(More)”

Open Data and Beyond

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Frederika Welle Donker, Bastiaan van Loenen and Arnold K. Bregt: “In recent years, there has been an increasing trend of releasing public sector information as open data. Governments worldwide see the potential benefits of opening up their data. The potential benefits are more transparency, increased governmental efficiency and effectiveness, and external benefits, including societal and economic benefits. The private sector also recognizes potential benefits of making their datasets available as open data. One such company is Liander, an energy network administrator in the Netherlands. Liander views open data as a contributing factor to energy conservation. However, to date there has been little research done into the actual effects of open data. This research has developed a monitoring framework to assess the effects of open data, and has applied the framework to Liander’s small-scale energy consumption dataset….(More)“

The Alberta CoLab Story: Redesigning the policy development process in government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alex Ryan at Medium: “Alberta CoLab is an evolving experiment built on three counter-intuitive ideas:

1. Culture shifts faster through collaborative project work than through a culture change initiative.

2. The way to accelerate policy development is to engage more perspectives and more complexity.

3. The best place to put a cross-ministry design team is in a line ministry.

I want to explain what CoLab is and why it has evolved the way it has. We don’t view CoLab as a best practice to be replicated, since our model is tailored to the specific culture and context of Alberta. Perhaps you are also trying to catalyze innovation inside a large bureaucratic organization. I hope you can learn something from our journey so far,….

….Both the successes and frustrations of Alberta CoLab are consequences of the way that we have mediated some key tensions and tradeoffs involved with setting up a public sector innovation lab. Practitioners in other labs will likely recognize these tensions and tradeoffs, although your successes and frustrations will be different depending on how your business model reconciles them.

  1. Where should the lab be? Public innovation labs can exist inside, outside, or on the edge of government. Dubai The Model Centre and Alberta CoLab operate inside government. Inside labs have the best access to senior decision makers and the authority to convene whole of government collaborations, but may find it harder to engage openly with citizens and stakeholders. Unicef Innovation Labs and NouLab exist outside of government. Outside labs have more freedom in who they convene, the kind of container they can create, and timelines to impact, but find it harder to connect with and affect policy change. MindLab and MaRS Solutions Lab are examples of labs on the edge of government. This positioning can offer the best of both worlds. However, edge labs are vulnerable to fluctuations in their relationship with government. Surviving and thriving on the edge means continually walking a tightrope between autonomy and integration. Labs can change their positioning. Alberta CoLab began as an external consulting project. The Behavioural Insights Team is a social purpose company that was spun-off from a lab inside the U.K. government. The location of the lab is unlikely to change often, so it is an important strategic choice.
  2. How deep should the lab go? Here the tension is between taking on small, tactical improvement projects that deliver tangible results, or tackling the big, strategic systems changes that will take years to manifest. Public sector innovation labs are a reaction to the almost total failure of traditional approaches to move the needle on systems change.Therefore, most labs have aspirations to the strategic and the systemic. Yet most labs are also operating in a dominant culture that demands quick wins and measures success by linear progress against a simple logic model theory of change. We believe that operating at either extreme of this spectrum is equally misguided. We use a portfolio approach and a barbell strategy to mediate this tension. Having a portfolio of projects allows us to invest energy in systems change and generate immediate value. It allows us to balance our projects across three horizons of innovation: sustaining innovations; disruptive innovations; and transformative innovations. A barbell strategy means avoiding the middle of the bell curve. We maintain a small number of long-term, flagship initiatives, combined with a rapid turnover of quick-win projects. This allows us to remind the organization of our immediate value without sacrificing long-term commitment to systems change.
  3. What relationship should the lab have with government? Even an inside lab must create some distance between itself and the broader government culture if it is to provide a safe space for innovation. There is a tension between being separate and being integrated. Developing novel ideas that get implemented requires the lab to be both separate and integrated at the same time. You need to decouple from regular policy cycles to enable divergence and creativity, yet provide input into key decisions at the right time. Sometimes these decision points are known in advance, but more often this means sensing and responding to a dynamic decision landscape. Underneath any effective lab is a powerful social network, which needs to cut across government silos and stratas and draw in external perspectives. I think of a lab as having a kind of respiratory rhythm. It starts by bringing fresh ideas into the organization, like a deep breath that provides the oxygen for new thinking. But new ideas are rarely welcome in old organizations. When the lab communicates outwards, these new ideas should be translated into familiar language and concepts, and then given a subtle twist. Often labs believe they have to differentiate their innovations — to emphasize novelty — to justify their existence as an innovation lab. But the more the output of the lab resembles the institutional culture, the more it appears obvious and familiar, the more likely it will be accepted and integrated into the mainstream.
  4. What relationship should the lab have with clients? Alberta CoLab is a kind of in-house consultancy that provides services to clients across all ministries. There is a tension in the nature of the relationship, which can span from consulting problem-solver to co-design facilitator to teacher. The main problem with a consulting model is it often builds dependency rather than capacity. The challenge with an educational relationship is that clients struggle to apply theory that is disconnected from practice. We often use facilitation as a ‘cover’ for our practice, because it allows us to design a process that enables both reflective practice and situated learning. By teaching systemic design and strategic foresight approaches through taking on live projects, we build capacity while doing the work our clients need to do anyway. This helps to break down barriers between theory and practice, learning and doing. Another tension is between doing what the client says she wants and what she needs but does not articulate. Unlike a customer, who is always right, the designer has a duty of care to their client. This involves pushing back when the client demands are unreasonable, reframing the challenge when the problem received is a symptom of a deeper issue, and clearly communicating the risks and potential side effects of policy options. As Denys Lasdun has said about designers: “Our job is to give the client, on time and on cost, not what he wants, but what he never dreamed he wanted; and when he gets it, he recognizes it as something he wanted all the time.”

Lessons Learned

These are our top lessons learned from our journey to date that may have broader applicability.

  1. Recruit outsiders and insiders. Bringing in outside experts elevates the lab’s status. Outsiders are essential to question and challenge organizational patterns that insiders take as given. Insiders bring an understanding of organizational culture. They know how to move files through the bureaucracy and they know where the landmines are.
  2. Show don’t tell. As lab practitioners, we tend to be process geeks with a strong belief in the superiority of our own methods. There is a temptation to cast oneself in the role of the missionary bringing the good word to the unwashed masses. Not only is this arrogant, it’s counter-productive. It’s much more effective to show your clients how your approach adds value by starting with a small collaborative project. If your approach really is as good as you believe it is, the results will speak for themselves. Once people are envious of the results you have achieved, they will be curious and open to learning how you did it, and they will demand more of it.
  3. Be a catalyst, not a bottleneck. Jess McMullin gave us this advice when we founded CoLab. It’s why we developed a six day training course to train over 80 systemic designers across the government. It’s why we run communities of practice on systemic design and strategic foresight. And it’s why we publish about our experiences and share the toolkits we develop. If the innovation lab is an ivory tower, it will not change the way government works. Think instead of the lab as the headquarters of a democratic grassroots movement.
  4. Select projects based on the potential for reframing. There are many criteria we apply when we decide whether to take on a new project. Is it a strategic priority? Is there commitment to implement? Are the client expectations realistic? Can our contribution have a positive impact? These are useful but apply to almost any service offering. The unique value a social innovation lab offers is discontinuous improvement. The source of discontinuous improvement is reframing — seeing a familiar challenge with new eyes, from a different perspective that opens up new potential for positive change. If a project ticks all the boxes, except that the client is certain they already know what the problem is, then that already limits the kind of solutions they will consider. Unless they are open to reframing, they will likely be frustrated by a lab approach, and would be better served by traditional facilitation or good project management.
  5. Prototyping is just the end of the beginning. After one year, we went around and interviewed the first 40 clients of Alberta CoLab. We wanted to know what they had achieved since our co-design sessions. Unfortunately, for most of them, the answer was “not much.” They were very happy with the quality of the ideas and prototypes generated while working with CoLab and were hopeful that the ideas would eventually see the light of day. But they also noted that once participants left the lab and went back to their desks, they found it difficult to sustain the momentum and excitement of the lab, and easy to snap back to business as usual. We had to pivot our strategy to take on fewer projects, but take on a greater stewardship role through to implementation.
  6. Find a rhythm. It’s not useful to create a traditional project plan with phases and milestones for a non-linear and open-ended discovery process like a lab. Yet without some kind of structure, it’s easy to lose momentum or become lost. The best projects I have participated in create a rhythm: an alternating movement between open collaboration and focused delivery. The lab opens up every few months to engage widely on what needs to be done and why. A core team then works between collaborative workshops on how to make it happen. Each cycle allows the group to frame key challenges, make progress, and receive feedback, which builds momentum and commitment.
  7. Be a good gardener. Most of the participants of our workshops arrive with a full plate. They are already 100% committed in their day jobs. Even when they are enthusiastic to ideate, they will be reluctant to take on any additional work. If we want our organizations to innovate, first we have to create the space for new work. We need to prune those projects that we have kept on life support — not yet declared dead but not priorities. This often means making difficult decisions. The flip side of pruning is to actively search for positive deviance and help it to grow. When you find something that’s already working, you just need to turn up the good…..(More)”

Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies

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]Book by Calestous Juma: “The rise of artificial intelligence has rekindled a long-standing debate regarding the impact of technology on employment. This is just one of many areas where exponential advances in technology signal both hope and fear, leading to public controversy. This book shows that many debates over new technologies are framed in the context of risks to moral values, human health, and environmental safety. But it argues that behind these legitimate concerns often lie deeper, but unacknowledged, socioeconomic considerations. Technological tensions are often heightened by perceptions that the benefits of new technologies will accrue only to small sections of society while the risks will be more widely distributed. Similarly, innovations that threaten to alter cultural identities tend to generate intense social concern. As such, societies that exhibit great economic and political inequities are likely to experience heightened technological controversies.

Drawing from nearly 600 years of technology history, Innovation and Its Enemies identifies the tension between the need for innovation and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order, and stability as one of today’s biggest policy challenges. It reveals the extent to which modern technological controversies grow out of distrust in public and private institutions. Using detailed case studies of coffee, the printing press, margarine, farm mechanization, electricity, mechanical refrigeration, recorded music, transgenic crops, and transgenic animals, it shows how new technologies emerge, take root, and create new institutional ecologies that favor their establishment in the marketplace. The book uses these lessons from history to contextualize contemporary debates surrounding technologies such as artificial intelligence, online learning, 3D printing, gene editing, robotics, drones, and renewable energy. It ultimately makes the case for shifting greater responsibility to public leaders to work with scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to manage technological change, make associated institutional adjustments, and expand public engagement on scientific and technological matters….(More)”

First, design for data sharing

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John Wilbanks & Stephen H Friend in Nature Biotechnology: “To upend current barriers to sharing clinical data and insights, we need a framework that not only accounts for choices made by trial participants but also qualifies researchers wishing to access and analyze the data.

This March, Sage Bionetworks (Seattle) began sharing curated data collected from >9,000 participants of mPower, a smartphone-enabled health research study for Parkinson’s disease. The mPower study is notable as one of the first observational assessments of human health to rapidly achieve scale as a result of its design and execution purely through a smartphone interface. To support this unique study design, we developed a novel electronic informed consent process that includes participant-determined data-sharing preferences. It is through these preferences that the new data—including self-reported outcomes and quantitative sensor data—are shared broadly for secondary analysis. Our hope is that by sharing these data immediately, prior even to our own complete analysis, we will shorten the time to harnessing any utility that this study’s data may hold to improve the condition of patients who suffer from this disease.

Turbulent times for data sharing

Our release of mPower comes at a turbulent time in data sharing. The power of data for secondary research is top of mind for many these days. Vice President Joe Biden, in heading President Barack Obama’s ambitious cancer ‘moonshot’, describes data sharing as second only to funding to the success of the effort. However, this powerful support for data sharing stands in opposition to the opinions of many within the research establishment. To wit, the august New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)’s recent editorial suggesting that those who wish to reuse clinical trial data without the direct participation and approval of the original study team are “research parasites”4. In the wake of colliding perspectives on data sharing, we must not lose sight of the scientific and societal ends served by such efforts.

It is important to acknowledge that meaningful data sharing is a nontrivial process that can require substantial investment to ensure that data are shared with sufficient context to guide data users. When data analysis is narrowly targeted to answer a specific and straightforward question—as with many clinical trials—this added effort might not result in improved insights. However, many areas of science, such as genomics, astronomy and high-energy physics, have moved to data collection methods in which large amounts of raw data are potentially of relevance to a wide variety of research questions, but the methodology of moving from raw data to interpretation is itself a subject of active research….(More)”

Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through

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Steve Lohr at the New York Times: “For years, the federal government, states and some cities have enthusiastically made vast troves of data open to the public. Acres of paper records on demographics, public health, traffic patterns, energy consumption, family incomes and many other topics have been digitized and posted on the web.

This abundance of data can be a gold mine for discovery and insights, but finding the nuggets can be arduous, requiring special skills.

A project coming out of the M.I.T. Media Lab on Monday seeks to ease that challenge and to make the value of government data available to a wider audience. The project, called Data USA, bills itself as “the most comprehensive visualization of U.S. public data.” It is free, and its software code is open source, meaning that developers can build custom applications by adding other data.

Cesar A. Hidalgo, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences at the M.I.T. Media Lab who led the development of Data USA, said the website was devised to “transform data into stories.” Those stories are typically presented as graphics, charts and written summaries….Type “New York” into the Data USA search box, and a drop-down menu presents choices — the city, the metropolitan area, the state and other options. Select the city, and the page displays an aerial shot of Manhattan with three basic statistics: population (8.49 million), median household income ($52,996) and median age (35.8).

Lower on the page are six icons for related subject categories, including economy, demographics and education. If you click on demographics, one of the so-called data stories appears, based largely on data from the American Community Survey of the United States Census Bureau.

Using colorful graphics and short sentences, it shows the median age of foreign-born residents of New York (44.7) and of residents born in the United States (28.6); the most common countries of origin for immigrants (the Dominican Republic, China and Mexico); and the percentage of residents who are American citizens (82.8 percent, compared with a national average of 93 percent).

Data USA features a selection of data results on its home page. They include the gender wage gap in Connecticut; the racial breakdown of poverty in Flint, Mich.; the wages of physicians and surgeons across the United States; and the institutions that award the most computer science degrees….(More)