Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems
Can we solve big public problems anymore? Yes, we can. The huge challenges we face are daunting indeed. At the same time, we've come to accept the sad notion that government can't do new things or solve tough problems—it's too big, too slow, and mired in bureaucracy. Not so, says former public official, now Harvard Business School professor, Mitchell Weiss. The truth is, entrepreneurial spirit and savvy in government are growing, transforming the public sector's response to big problems at all levels. The key, Weiss argues, is a shift from a mindset of Probability Government—overly focused on safe solutions and mimicking so-called best practices—to Possibility Government. This means public leadership and management that's willing to boldly imagine new possibilities and to experiment. Weiss shares the three basic tenets of this new way of governing: Government that can imagine; Government that can try new things; Government that can scale.
"Storrowed" is an exercise to help participants raise their capacity and curiosity for generative AI. It focuses on generative AI for problem understanding and ideation. The exercise begins with the following introduction: "A problem vexed Boston, Massachusetts, and its drivers. Trucks got stuck under the bridges on the city's Storrow Drive so often that this predicament even had a name, 'Storrowing' or getting 'Storrowed'. One driver - dismayed and delayed on the way to work behind one such run-in - wondered, 'What would AI have to say about why this keeps happening?'" The exercise is accompanied by a game and can be run in teams; the best prompts keep the teams' trucks from "Storrowing."
In May 2022, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) launched the pilot of Metaverse Seoul, a government-run metaverse. SMG had delivered a virtual version of Seoul’s mayor’s office. The team aimed to gain insights as they worked towards building a broad, immersive, online government platform. They’d invited citizen feedback in many ways, including via a virtual mailbox and bulletin board placed prominently around the corner from where an avatar of the mayor could greet visitors and preside over gatherings. Now, public comments were coming in and the team had to decide what to make of them.
By April 7, 2020, over 1.4 million people worldwide had contracted the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Governments raced to curb the spread of COVID-19 by scaling up testing, quarantining those infected, and tracing their possible contacts. It had taken Singapore's Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and Ministry of Health (MOH) all of eight weeks to develop the world's first nationwide deployment of a Bluetooth-based contact tracing system, TraceTogether, and deploy it in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19. From late January to mid-March 2020, GovTech's Jason Bay and his team raced to create a technology that would supplement the work of Singapore's human contact tracers. Days after its launch, Singapore's foreign minister announced plans to open source the technology. Now, in early April, TraceTogether was a beta for the world. Whether the system would really help in Singapore, and whether other countries should adopt it was still a wide-open question.
Nimit Sawhney scrolled through the tweet stream on his phone, unsure of what to make of it on August 6, 2018 or how to respond. Voatz, the Boston-based startup he co-founded and led, provided a mobile-voting platform. In March of 2018, had successfully piloted the new technology to enable U.S. servicemembers stationed abroad to vote securely in West Virginia’s primary election. Two West Virginia counties had participated in the first test. Thirteen people voted from their mobile phones, a much more convenient alternative than the other options available to service members abroad. The very first West Virginia voter to use the app called it “slick.” Two dozen West Virginia counties were preparing to make mobile-voting via Voatz an option for their citizens living abroad in the general elections slated for November. But the August tweets threw this plan into question. Kevin Beaumont tweeting as @GossiTheDog retweeted a CNN article about Voatz and the upcoming November election with his own commentary: “This is going to backfire.” He accused Voatz of operating with out-of-date security for remote logins. It would get worse from there. And Sawhney’s task was to figure out how to make it better.
Dai Wei and his co-founders grew Beijing-based ofo from a school-based startup to a bike-share behemoth in a matter of months, topped an all-out market-share battle fueled with almost $1 billion in venture capital, provided 2 billion bicycle rides, soaked up the majority of the bike manufacturing capacity in all of China, and then, in July of 2017, hit pause. The proximate reason for halting their purchase of new bicycles was a supply imbalance: ofo had many more bikes on their way than they did the smart-locks that allowed their customers to unlock them with their cell-phones. But the breather would also give ofo’s leaders a chance to re-assess their plans for the rest of the year. For how long, to what end, and at what cost, to wage their market-share battle with main rival, Mobike? How aggressively to pursue their international expansion and what adjustments, if any, to make from their model in dozens of Chinese cities? And what to do about the concerns from government officials that ofo’s dockless bikes and those of dozens of competitors were creating hazards on city streets? Wei and four schoolmates at Peking University had launched ofo on their campus with 1000 bikes in fall 2015. Since then, they had deployed 6.5 million. The question now was how many more?
Pittsburgh’s mayor had been among the first to welcome self-driving vehicles, but was now one of many needing to react after a pedestrian fatality involving an autonomous Uber in Arizona. He had originally preferred to roll out “the red carpet” instead of the “red tape”. Now he found himself needing to balance technological advancement and the city’s economic trajectory against public health and safety concerns and, simply, citizens’ fears. Post-Arizona, should he allow AV firms to double down on experimentation? When it came to testing new technology, how safe was safe enough?
Shield AI’s quadcopter—with no pilot and no flight plan—could clear a building and outpace human warfighters by almost five minutes in 2017. This was not to say that it was better than the warfighters or would replace their jobs, but it was evidence that autonomous robots deployed in this fashion could keep up with the pace of operators, serve as a force multiplier, and help protect civilian and service member lives. But was it evidence that the Shield AI team should ask their newest potential customer for a contract 50-60 times more than their only two contracts to date? Would asking for what a system of coordinated, exploring robots really cost—$50 to $60 million—scare off their U.S. government customer? No one would blink if Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or other large defense companies proposed a $60 million effort to do the same, but would it make Shield AI, barely two years past founding, look arrogant, ignorant, or both?
In the Republic of Georgia, legend had it their land was a precious gift from God he had intended to keep for his mother. But over time, the land had been under intermittent threat from without and within. In 2017, the Bitfury Group, which Valery Vavilov had co-founded, had helped publish 300,000 Georgian land titles onto the blockchain, making them immutable and, many believed, unhackable. What came next, Vavilov’s team envisioned, were smart purchase and sale contracts via the blockchain; and from there, a full suite of property-related services and, eventually, blockchain as the foundation for a transformation in government services. Vavilov, who had co-founded Bitfury and expanded it substantially from its bitcoin mining roots, felt a blockchain-driven makeover of this sort would take place not just in Georgia's government, but around the world. It was not a matter of "if?" anymore; although that still left the question of "when?"
“Hacking Heroin” was the first hackathon that Annie Rittgers, founder of Cincinnati-based consultancy firm 17a, had organized or even attended. “There will continue to be a lot of preventable overdose deaths and wasted potential if the opioid crisis continues unabated,” she said. “Bright spots and positive momentum matter when it comes to directing the energy that exists in Cincinnati toward addressing the epidemic.” Now though, days before Hacking Heroin in June 2017, it wasn’t clear that Rittgers’s intercession would prove to be one of these “bright spots.” Not quite 50 people had registered for the free event, and there was no guarantee that they would attend. Sponsorships for the event had been slow to materialize. The eight challenges that she and the team planned to pose to hackathon participants were mostly, but not entirely, settled. Some, but not all, of the key hospital leaders had signed on to participate in the event. Rittgers wondered what she could do to nudge the hackathon towards success. Were these just expected hurdles, and it would all turn out okay? Were they warning signs that warranted remedy? Or were they cues that hackathon skeptics had been right all along—what kind of way was this to address a problem of epidemic proportions anyway?
Di-Ann Eisnor, Director of Growth at Waze, founded the company’s Connected Citizens Program (CCP), a data-sharing partnership that provided officials with traffic incident and congestion data in exchange for data on anticipated road closures, re-routing, etc. Since 2015, her program had enabled officials in Kentucky and elsewhere to share more reliable traffic information more quickly with drivers. Amidst limited resources, her free program had become a key tool in their transit management arsenal. But now, facing ever-rising expectations and perhaps record crowds, the program that Eisnor and CCP’s 3-person team had built, was short the analytical tools Kentucky officials felt they needed to prepare for the Kentucky Derby, their biggest event of the year. What would she do about that? Eisnor had a challenge on her hands in Kentucky. And also in Jakarta. And Los Angeles. From its launch in October 2014 through spring 2016, one-on-one contact by her small CCP team had spurred growth from 10 to more than 50 partners, including city, state and country government agencies, nonprofits and first responders. CCP’s early successes had won numerous accolades in the international press. This high-profile media attention had, in turn, earned Eisnor and Paige Fitzgerald, CCP’s Program Manager, kudos from their Waze colleagues and caught the attention of Waze’s now-parent company, Google. But the successes came with high expectations, too. Waze was intensely focused on user-growth and Google’s culture was to build things and then build those things “10x” bigger. How would Eisnor’s team take a free program supported by three people to 500 partners, or more?
Mikey Dickerson and Haley Van Dyck found themselves far from home and far from certain about where to take the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) next. In the summer of 2015, they had landed in London to meet with Mike Bracken, director of the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service (GDS). In 2014, President Barack Obama had given USDS a monumental task: transform how the federal government worked for the American people, digitally. The seeds of USDS had grown out of the rescue of HealthCare.gov, the federal website meant to allow consumers to shop for private health insurance. Its launch and crash in October 2013 had threatened one of Obama’s signature policy achievements. Dickerson and a small team had been drafted to help fix HealthCare.gov and had successfully done so in a matter of months. While in London, Dickerson and Van Dyck wondered, of the other areas that most cried out for new technology approaches, which should be tackled next? Moreover, GDS had embedded satellite teams into the UK’s government agencies to guide, assist, and in some cases control, each agency’s digital presence. Did London hold lessons for if, and how, these teams could be successful in the U.S. government? USDS had begun to experiment with this model too, embedding teams in a handful of departments in the U.S federal government. How could USDS best work with the dozens of agencies that were actually doing the work of government?
In February 2014, Amsterdam became the first city to issue new regulations specifically to allow home-sharing. Airbnb's Molly Turner, Global Head of Civic Partnerships; her colleagues at the San Francisco based home-sharing platform; and her counterparts in Amsterdam's city leadership now had to make the new rules function well. By the summer of 2014, the question of how exactly to do that remained unsettled. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that Airbnb was negotiating with Amsterdam officials to supplement the new home-sharing rules was not materializing. Turner was hearing that the company's proposed commitments that spanned education on regulations, enforcement-assistance, and tax collection might not be enough to secure what would be Airbnb's broadest partnership with any city anywhere. Nanette Schippers was Amsterdam's Advisor on the Sharing Economy in its Innovation Office, and its lead at the negotiating table that summer. She was worried by the stand-still, too. A primary reason for the impasse in the negotiations was that Amsterdam wanted access to Airbnb's data in order to enforce the new laws more easily, while Airbnb sought to protect user privacy. For Airbnb, privacy, precedents and platform principles were at stake. For Amsterdam, it was a matter of making sure that the historic city did not become "Venice, or Florence, or 'Disneyland'"; that it wasn't overrun by visitors and that locals weren't crowded out. Could the two parties now find dry land?
SST offered a subscription-based gunfire detection service, ShotSpotter Flex, to cities across the United States, and a few abroad. Over its 20-year history, SST had mostly honed a reliable business to government sales model, and the company had been focused on expanding to new cities. But Ralph Clark, President and CEO, was also interested in investigating new services. Mass shootings, in U.S. schools to cities abroad, were consistently followed with calls to his office: "Do you have a solution for us?" Could a ShotSpotter Flex-like service be sold to college campuses and other venues concerned with shootings? Should SST adapt the hardware and the software for indoor applications, like shopping malls and movie theaters? Was the next step in the company's growth a move towards city-wide deployments through smart cities, even to detect gunfire during terrorist attacks? Clark had been cautious about moving the company into new services. However, he was also aware, as were his investors, that the market of U.S. cities with gun-violence problems would eventually cap out. Entering new markets posed a great opportunity, but also significant technical and operational challenges. Now in 2016, Clark weighed the implications.
The founders of Mark43, an early-stage startup that provides software for law enforcement agencies, must decide whether to bid on a request for proposals (RFP) from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). On the one hand, LAPD would be a second large and influential customer for a startup that has just successfully deployed software for its first customer, the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department. On the other hand, pursuing the LAPD RFP could consume most of Mark43's engineering resources for the coming year, pushing other business development opportunities off their roadmap, in particular, plans to target small and medium-sized police departments.
There were probably 30,000 public buses, minibuses, and vans in Mexico City. Though, in 2015, no one knew for certain since no comprehensive schedule existed. This was why el Laboratorio para la Ciudad (or LabCDMX) had spawned an effort to generate a map of the labyrinth system that provided an estimated 14 million rides a day. Gabriella Gómez-Mont, the Lab's founder and director, had led her team in a project to crowd-source the routes from volunteer riders in what came to be known as Mapatón CDMX. After four pilots and a two-week "mapping marathon" later, she wondered exactly what to make of the lab's fiftieth experiment? Was Mapatón successful?
To accelerate Bigbelly's sales growth and its "smart cities" positioning, its CEO planned to shift his company from equipment sales to a subscription service. Jack Kutner hoped to re-position Bigbelly's solar-powered trash compacting stations beyond trash and recycling and use them also to provide public space Wi-Fi, advertising, and urban intelligence sensors. "One year from now we will no longer sell any machines," Kutner planned to tell the company's board of directors. Would they buy his subscription-only pitch? And if they did, would Bigbelly's still-reluctant purchasers?
Funding to scale Citizens Connect, Boston's 311 app, is both a blessing and a burden and tests two public entrepreneurs. In 2012, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts provides Boston's Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics with a grant to scale Citizens Connect across the state. The money gives two co-creators of Citizens Connect, Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob, a chance to grow their vision for citizen-engaged governance and civic innovation, but it also requires that the two City of Boston leaders sit on a formal selection committee that pits their original partner, Connected Bits, against another player that might meet the specific requirements for delivering a statewide version. The selection and scaling process raises questions beyond just which partner to choose. What would happen to the Citizens Connect brand as Osgood and Jacob's product spreads across the state? Who could help scale their work best then nationally? Which business models were best positioned to drive that growth? What intellectual property arrangements would best enable it? And what role should the two city employees have, anyway, in scaling Citizens Connect outside of Boston in the first place? These questions hung in the air as they pondered the big one about passing over Connected Bits for another partner: Should they?
Innovation, in cities and other contexts, often involves adaptation and repurposing, a program scaled to another place or a private sector tool tweaked for public use. But starting from scratch and doing something truly new can sometimes be the key to solving problems faster and more effectively.
Public entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship. It’s the pursuit by public officials and their collaborators of opportunity without regard to resources controlled. But still today, we mostly train future public leaders to be public administrators. We school them in performance management and leave them too inclined to run from risk instead of managing it. And we communicate often, explicitly or not, to private entrepreneurs that government officials are failures and dinosaurs. It’s hard to see how that empowers public officials to take on the enormous challenges that still lie ahead of us, or how it enables the public to help them.
