Innovation made Practical
Our structure is uniquely designed to provide a modular and scalable innovation capacity to local governments. Our intent is to maximize potential value creation while minimizing public commitment of resources, time and risk.
Working Groups
Working Groups are purpose-driven networks of public and private stakeholders structured around key topics impacting local governments across the country. They function as the product owner of the solution. They are the primary touchpoint between technology and end user, responsible for defining a given problem, documenting business requirements, evaluating and prioritizing potential solutions as well as testing prototypes with users, consuming feedback for iterative development and evangelizing the solution for broad-based adoption.
The capacity to effectively identify and define a problem could be the most overlooked part of any innovation strategy. Effectively identifying and defining problems is about being in touch with the realities of the problem scope in focus and relating to the needs and objectives of all stakeholders involved. Interestingly, a well-defined problem often contains its own solution within it, and that solution is usually quite obvious and straightforward. By defining problems properly, you make them easier to solve, which means saving time, money and resources.
The working group is responsible for evaluating each proposal created by the Technology Innovation Network(TIN) in context of impact, cost and risk. This requires user research, stakeholder buy-in for piloting and more. The objective is to prioritize solutions for development with the highest probability of successful implementation.
After a prototype has been developed by the TIN, it is the responsibility of the Working Group to pilot this solution with a public sector stakeholder. During this stage the Working Group is primarily concerned with testing product-market fit of the solution as well as gathering feedback and synthesizing this into new requirements for future iterations of the solution.
Implementing a technical solution and adopting it are two very different things. Adoption is about making use of the technology and maximizing its potential to add value. It is the Working Groups responsibility to ensure that technologies being implemented are also being adopted by the organization.
Technology Innovation Network
New technologies provide access to entirely new capabilities, allowing us to reimagine the business models we use to create and capture value. The following are some business model attributes most relevant to the ongoing ICT revolution.
The tech group is responsible for consuming the Problem Scope and ideating around the problems/constraints in context to identify technologies that can add value. Our focus tech acts as an anchor to our solutioning and our close interaction with the working group provides quick feedback throughout the ideation phase.
After the Working Group has identified an optimal solution for development, the TIN is asked with the design and development of the initial prototype to be piloted.
After a solution is iterated upon to the point where it is ready for scale, the TIN is responsible for full scale deployment and the production of technical materials/resources to help facilitate adoption.