Leveraging Modularity to Launch Innovation
When it comes to jargon, there likely isn’t a sector on the planet that approaches the rarefied heights of government terminology. Unless, of course, you consider innovation a sector unto itself. When you combine the two of them? Forget it, 1,000 monkeys (or 1 ChatGPT instance) may eventually bang out Shakespeare’s complete works, but they’ll struggle to put a dent in the public sector innovation corpus.
Portals, Labs, Incubators, Test Beds, Accelerators. All are designed to help move innovation forward but many industry insiders can’t define the functional differences between them. This confusion makes it difficult to know which one is best for supporting a given project. When that murkiness is left to linger it makes innovation processes less efficient and reduces the impact of the solutions produced. No one wants to invest their time, resources, and energy into something new (no matter how cool the little icons are) if they don’t understand how it solves the problems they are facing.
Pulling Back the Curtain
Imagine the trope of a Victorian inventor standing at a velour curtain regaling audiences about an incredible discovery that will revolutionize life as we know it. You know the one: big hat, fancy words, billowing smoke. It’s excellent showmanship, but when the curtain falls it reveals another dose of small impact snake oil. Effective innovation pipelines strip away the curtains, the smoke and mirrors, the pretention. They focus on outcomes and require clear, precise communication about what is under development, the progress being made, and the impact it’s likely to have.
Progress should be measured on two distinct and equally important tracks: how close is the tool to being usable, and how prepared are the people to use it - we’ll come back to this second piece in future blogs. For the first one, NASA and many other agencies use nine Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs, as some know them) to assess the maturity of a particular technology. They communicate development from abstract idea, to laboratory prototype, to field prototype, to full-scale field test, to mission-proven system. Technology Readiness Levels were primarily designed for use in research settings, but the idea can be adapted to develop a similar method for measuring and communicating progress relevant to a wide variety of innovations for environmental stewardship. Using accessible language and clear milestones tells you how the project is going, maintains alignment between teams (R&D, IT, practitioners, etc), and describes what kind of support the project needs to move forward. These stages should guide the use of the innovation modules described below on a project-by-project basis.
The central elements are the phases and associated actions necessary to develop innovative projects. The items at the top are what each phase produces and feeds to kickstart the next phase. The track at the bottom maps these phases + functions to the modules we’ll discuss. Critically: projects can begin receiving formalized support at any point in this process, so if something is already past its “Proof of Concept” phase, give it the mature support of a Lab or Test Bed, not a Portal or Incubator.
Defining our Modules
A healthy environmental technology ecosystem stimulates the development and dissemination of data and tools. To do so, it must provide its members with the right blend of skills, processes, and resources to pursue and develop a vast variety of ideas at varying levels of maturity. The modules detailed below package resources and personnel to achieve specific, measurable milestones in the development of environmental technologies. These functions must be accessible to innovators and managers who wish to develop innovative technology for environmental ends.
Portal - A clear and simple entrypoint where innovators can submit their ideas for consideration to all relevant parties without needing to understand the internal bureaucracies to be seen by the right people.
Incubator - A safe space for a new idea to grow, focused on transforming a concept into a project with a delineated process for development connected to strategic goals.
Lab - An Inoculation and experimentation space where prototypes are exposed to known challenges, applied to problems, and adjusted to fulfill their purpose safely, effectively, and consistently.
Test Bed - An environment where prototypes are put through a test battery of real or realistic situations where they must fulfill their purpose by adapting to previously unknown challenges.
Accelerator - A resource, learning, and networking condenser that injects large investments of energy and capital into a mature project over a short time span to vault it towards production.
The Case for Modularity
Break away from linear thinking and focus on applying the correct support structures in the right places. One-size-fits-all is just as much a myth in innovation as it is in clothing. The support a project needs is a reflection of its maturity, point of origin, purpose, audience, the resources it has already received, and the skillset of its team.
Imagine a team composed of park rangers, GIS specialists, soil scientists, and user researchers building a citizen science tool for tracking erosion. After developing the plan and creating a prototype in an Incubator, they may not need a Lab because their cross-functional team was able to pre-build solutions for a wider range of known challenges than normal. Dropping them into an Accelerator that rapidly transforms their prototype into a product will move them into a Test Bed more quickly while reducing costs and frustrations. Similarly, it would be wasteful and self-defeating for a private sector team seeking field-testing opportunities for their forest inventorying software to go through the developmental modules when all they really need is a Test Bed or piloting agreement.
Modularity is as beneficial for the people as the product. Using time and resources well removes unnecessary uncertainty from innovation processes - which are inherently loaded with uncertainty as it is. This leads to a better experience for the development team, and faster results for the people doing environmental work. Positivity and visibility are the surest guards against risk-aversion and malaise - if people see progress being made, they want to be a part of it; they want to benefit from it. Combining this with a properly consulted and prepared workforce leads to what we call “authentic adoption” - moving beyond the procurement, distribution, and advertisement of a tool and on to its actual uptake and impactful use.
As land management, scientific, environmental, and technology talent across the federal government is removed, we’ll need to make efficient and effective use of all innovation modules across sectors to fill the gap. The flexibility of a modular approach promotes resilience in the face of staffing uncertainty, responsiveness to shifting priorities, and efficiency to do more with less. Check back on this blog series to dig into implementation and resourcing details for each module in this flexible innovation framework.