Enabling Public Sector Environmental Stewardship Through Technological Innovation
To catalyze innovation, you need to know your starting point. These Innovation Indicators are our experimental metrics for tracking trends and interventions associated with technological adoption.
They illustrate the teams, processes, culture and organizational dynamics that enable agencies to develop, procure, and use innovative technology for environmental stewardship.
The Upshot
With low percentages of technologists on staff, and low rates of hiring technologists, environmental agencies are ad hoc loading specialized skills onto programmatic staff, degrading their ability to develop and adopt the best tools for their mission.
Environmental agencies are no longer issuing prize competitions to address problems, severely inhibiting smaller, more agile innovators from proposing novel solutions.
Environmental agencies are adopting Open Source development practices at higher rates than their benchmark comparisons.
Measuring the Strength of the Foundation, Not the Height of the Tower
The fundamental thesis behind the Innovation Indicators (and EPIC’s Technology Team, for that matter) is that modern, transparent digital systems built on good data and maintained by a skilled, robust workforce are a force multiplier for environmental resiliency and restoration. Innovation Indicators are not Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Innovation Indicators measure means, whereas KPIs measure ends. Hiring technologists skilled with machine learning will not save wetlands by itself. But having them on the team creates opportunities to develop and leverage the best available science and technology towards that end. A stripped down workforce will recognize fewer opportunities and be capable of capitalizing on fewer still. Here are a few ways to use our findings as we explore:
Advocacy - If you agree with our logic, these data can be used to advocate for support in pursuing the recommended actions.
Experimentation - Take action and see if it gives you better results.
Strategic Planning - Fold the Innovation Indicators into your planning and track progress over time.
Bottom Line
Environmental agencies face strong headwinds. Leaning into them with strategic precision and operational efficiency is more important than ever. Fortifying their foundation with these indicators will prepare them for that hard work ahead.
Perhaps more than anything, the Innovation Indicators map resource allocations and mission delivery tactics to organizational culture. To realize their missions at the necessary speed and scale, environmental agencies need to leverage the power of innovative cultures that value flexibility, creativity, open-mindedness, and productive debate. They employ teams that use these values collaboratively to adopt tools authentically: meaning they go beyond just procuring new technologies and actually use them to the fullest extent possible to take meaningful, scientifically sound action.
Review the summary table above. Every agency we looked at has at least one area of growth available to them. Fortunately, in every area of growth there is at least one sister agency to collaborate with and learn from.
Explore the indicators
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Workforces with a healthy ratio of technical to non-technical talent can react to innovation opportunities more quickly and effectively while performing mission critical upkeep and collaboration duties.
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Increasing the share of roles focused on innovative technologies and practices is critical to finding novel solutions that accelerate environmental outcomes.
People
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Challenges are explicitly a catalyst for innovative public-private partnership; evaluating their use assesses the extent to which agencies are prioritizing innovation over familiarity.
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Open source software development with a contemporary codebase is the gold standard for innovation, prioritizing transparency, collaboration, and modernity produces more effective and efficient tooling.