HHS

Sometimes we get caught up in buzzwords of the day:  Total Quality Management, Lean Six Sigma, Agile, Business Process Reengineering, or Reinventing Government.  But the bottom line in each of these types of management improvement initiatives is:  how do we create a culture of innovation?

What is “innovation?”  There are plenty of different definitions, but one I’ve found to be practical is: “New ideas, or current thinking applied in fundamentally different ways, resulting in significant change in operating models, business processes, or products and services.” 

Government managers, however, can use these new approaches to dramatically improve the performance of their programs, if done right.

Last week, OMB released a new and substantially improved Performance.gov website, with in-depth performance information on individual agency priority goals. This represents a significant step forward from the initial release in August 2011, which listed and described the goals, but did not provide much detail about them.  I had a chance to talk with some OMB staff about what’s new about the website, and take a quick browse through it. Here’s a summary of what I learned.

Successful inventions often spring from the minds of individual inventors – we often think of Thomas Edison at the classic inventor. But successful innovation is a team sport, according to a new Harvard Business Review article by a team of researchers – Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback.

These are important and age-old questions.