New Law Expands Open Innovation Opportunities for Federal Agencies

By Eric Beidel

For those pioneering more innovative ways of doing business in the federal government, there is a new law to back you in your efforts.

The president signed the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act into law on January 6.

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The new legislation is the successor to the America COMPETES Act, which originally gave federal agencies broad authority to use prize competitions to engage with the public in the search for solutions to critical problems.

But the major addition is new language devoted to crowdsourcing and citizen science, which provide federal agencies with additional opportunities to advance their missions through public engagement.

Title IV of the new law, “Leveraging the Private Sector,” is where you will find both the updates to the prize competition authority (which updates Section 24 of the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980), as well as the new section about citizen science and crowdsourcing.

The law states that the legal authority granted to federal agencies to run prize competitions has yielded numerous benefits and that crowdsourcing and citizen science offer additional unique benefits, including:

·         accelerating scientific research;

·         increasing cost-effectiveness;

·         addressing societal needs;

·         providing hands-on learning in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM); and

·         connecting members of the public directly to federal science agency missions and to each other.

As such, the new law grants direct authority to federal agencies to use crowdsourcing and citizen science to advance their missions. It allows for the same kinds of multi-sector partnerships and funding for these endeavors as it does for prize competitions. The new law further updates the prize authority to provide agencies with the authority to team up with other agencies, for-profit and nonprofit entities, and local, state and tribal governments to create projects.

The new language reflects a trend noted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in its most recent progress report on prize competitions — increasingly sophisticated and ambitious projects enabled by partnerships in and out of the federal government.

The new law builds upon the work of many federal pioneers who have built a strong foundation for public engagement and open innovation in government.

Open innovation is all about removing barriers between government and the best ideas, no matter where they come from. It can save time, money and opens the door to talent and ingenuity the government may not have encountered otherwise.

The new law encourages agencies to designate a crowdsourcing and citizen science coordinator, reaffirming a previous memo from OSTP. It also designates facilitation of the use of crowdsourcing and citizen to the General Services Administration and OSTP, which already have a longstanding partnership promoting open innovation in the federal government.

GSA is home to both Challenge.gov and CitizenScience.gov, the central hubs for federal prize competitions and crowdsourcing/citizen science, respectively.

Last month, GSA and the OSTP launched the Federal Challenges and Prizes Toolkit to make it easier for agencies to run more ambitious prize competitions. It acts as a companion piece to the Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Toolkit, which was established in September 2015 and is cited specifically in the new law as a source of guidance to federal agencies.

These online portals offer a plethora of how-to resources, access to experts and opportunities to engage with active and growing communities of federal employees who already have been putting these innovative methods to use at their respective agencies.

With these resources and the American Competitiveness and Innovation Act, federal agencies now have additional tools at their disposal to more effectively and efficiently do the business of the American public — with the help of the people themselves.

By Eric Beidel