How can agencies and technology providers work together to accelerate environmental progress?
Utilizing new and improved technologies in support of environmental agency missions represents a major opportunity to speed up progress toward our nation’s environmental goals. To do so, government agencies need to work with an ecosystem of environmental technology providers, both private and nonprofit.
Currently, technology providers and government agencies face several barriers to collaboration.
Through our interviews with mostly smaller technology providers, we identified three findings that, if addressed, could meaningfully accelerate the pace of technology projects at environmental agencies:
Inefficient ways for technology providers to understand environmental agencies’ programmatic needs.
High administrative costs that can overwhelm the potential benefits of working with environmental agencies.
A patchwork of technology policies and practices that slows down or prevents projects.
We’ve identified seven solutions.
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One way agencies can reduce the time it takes to match technology providers with agency program needs is to proactively pull in more information on technologies, analyze it, and share that information across the agency or to partners, such as regulated entities.
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Currently, information on agency technology programs and how to engage with agency staff is fragmented.
Consolidating this information by agency or sector could enable a technology provider to submit information once rather than “starting over” with each office, program or agency.
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In some cases, technology providers face challenges finding who they can contact about agencies’ needs and procurement processes, especially when providers do not already have contact with the agency.
Some agencies have proven successful with robust liaison functions for interacting with companies interested in licensing technologies developed in government labs and using them in the private sector.
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For more transparency, agencies could issue a detailed, publicly accessible strategy document that focuses on the outcomes that agencies seek from technology projects for specific programs.
This can help send signals to technology providers about where there might be an opportunity to innovate and help align expectations internally and externally before projects begin.
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Maximizing the accessibility of information could help overcome some of the capacity and planning hurdles that technology providers face when working with federal environmental agencies.
Making resources more tailored or requiring less knowledge of federal contracting could be a concrete way to encourage more technology providers to work with environmental agencies.
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Technology providers have found success contributing to projects that received agency awards to raise the profile of technology projects and help overcome risk aversion in government.
Institutionalizing or automating information sharing on technology projects could help successful approaches spread faster.
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Contracts, grants, and other agreements are not one-size-fits-all. To ensure the most effective strategy, agencies could diversify opportunities for nonprofits by focusing more on open data where appropriate or alternative clauses or approaches to working with agencies that could help navigate some of the hurdles they encounter.
Let’s collaborate.
We are working with industries and government agencies to develop policies that accelerate the pace of technology projects for environmental stewardship.
Put policy in motion.
Too often, policies and processes that were not designed for engaging with technology providers slow down projects, or prevent them from ever starting. Let’s change that.