Reinventing Government through Political Entrepreneurship and Exponential Innovation

By Michael Mascioni

This book highlights major innovation forces dramatically reshaping government and public policy. Those include: the rise of political entrepreneurship; such new innovative strategies and techniques as crowdsourcing, gamification, and rapid experimentation; the increasing application of such exponential technologies as AI, VR, and robotics in government and public policy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Mascioni
• Release date: Nov 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005464103

Michael Mascioni

Michael Mascioni is a writer, futurist, and conference producer focused on digital media, technology, and innovation. He is the author of "Reinventing Government through Political Entrepreneurship and Exponential Innovation," and is co-author of "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier." He also wrote a chapter on the future of ambient interactivity in public places for "FutureScapes- the Future of Business," and is the author of a chapter on the future of immersive media in amusement parks for "50:50- Scenarios for the Next 50 Years."Mr. Mascioni writes freelance for such publications as Innovation & Tech Today, Hotelier, and Inter Park. He was senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, and director of client services for the Global Management Bureau. Mr. Mascioni was co-chairman of the Future of Immersive Leisure conferences, and was program director of the Intertainment conferences on interactive entertainment. In addition, he was conference director of the Hybrid Energy Innovations Conference.He holds an M.S. in Management from the Polytechnic Institute of NY, and a B.A. in English from St. Lawrence University.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Government Transformation through Political Entrepreneurship and Collaborative Innovation

Discussions of disruption, exponential innovation, and entrepreneurship are rife across the business and technological worlds, but little attention has been devoted to exploring and understanding the full scope and impact of those elements in politics and government, which extend far beyond such practices as the use of social media.

Transformational political innovation can no longer be ignored or considered optional, given the grave economic, health, political, and societal challenges we face.

The key role of exponential technologies in government has been underlined by their essential use during the recent COVID pandemic. For example, the FDA in the US authorized the use of suitable 3D printed PPE to ease shortages of that equipment during the pandemic and open up new supply lines. In addition, several outside vendors of 3D printing software and equipment provided PPE without government prompting or investment to hospitals and other facilities in New York and other locations. The US government’s Operation Warp Speed program also illuminated the value and power of exponential medical innovation orchestrated by a new kind of private and public sector partnership for the development and delivery of much needed coronavirus vaccines starting in December 2020. The program essentially front-loaded medical innovation and government funding, building on research extending over a long period. In fact, the program has been touted as a model for possible future government-initiated innovation programs and next-generation public/private partnerships. In a broad effort to focus government attention and resources on long term health problems, President Biden included in his 2022 budget proposal an allocation of $6.5 billion for a new agency called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health under the NIH, which will be designed to help accelerate medical innovation addressing such major health challenges as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and pandemics.

The response to a second Coronavirus Relief proposal in the US advocated by the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, and partly catalyzed by No Labels, highlights the growing influence and prominence of alternative political actors and channels in politics and government. The $1.5 trillion COVID-19 relief bill encompassed additional stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, and help for small businesses and schools, and received considerable media attention and support from key political actors. It eventually helped pave the way for the $900 billion COVID-19 Relief Bill passed in December 2021.

The term political entrepreneurship itself was relatively obscure until a few years ago and is not well understood. Now, a growing number of writers and political analysts have been illuminating parallels between business and technology startups and political startups, such as new political parties, that have engineered disruption in the political world. This book views political entrepreneurs as political risk-takers that allocate resources, make weighty bets on particular industries, establish new kinds of partnerships with businesses, citizen groups, and other organizations, and help to cultivate new ecosystems for businesses and other organizations far beyond government’s traditional role in fostering business development. They are fostering more collaborative and even liquid government.

As this book demonstrates, innovation in an increasing number of government bodies has become far more diffuse, cross-disciplinary, expansive, and fluid, especially with the rise of digital government practices and greater citizen input. Government and political innovation now exist on far more diverse levels, including traditional states, alternative political parties, new kinds of centrist think tanks, and virtual nations, though some of these forms are clearly very underdeveloped. Government innovation is no longer the sole province of a handful of government agencies, offices, and lab lockboxes. It’s more diverse in nature, and generally less wed to gimmicks and short-term thinking. In fact, government innovation encompasses not just technological innovation, but also such innovation forms as social innovation, workplace innovation, policy innovation, and design innovation. Innovation forms such as open innovation common in business have increasingly filtered into government, for example.

It’s striking that government officials involved with innovation apply terms commonly used in the business sector to government service design and implementation. For example, Jordan Sun, former Chief Innovation Officer of the City of San Jose, believes better practices need to be developed in government to determine how we should do good product management, and good product design that drives innovation. Government innovators often talk of improving the customer experience regarding service delivery to the public in a way not too dissimilar from that often used in business.

For too many people, politics seems to exist in a hypercompetitive, cacophonous world that is bent on endless political wars and extreme polarization. The apotheosis of this environment was the theatrical atmosphere evident in mercurial, bombastic tweets and speeches of former President Trump, breathless talk of bombshell revelations about Trump on major news channels, and seemingly non-stop impeachment campaigns spearheaded by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, all of which drove major news cycles in the US and represented media cash cows. This essentially constituted ultimate political fighting, complete with quintessential trash talking. Wild fantasies and conspiracy theories also permeated certain media and social media coverage of the 2020 US Presidential campaign. The media also feasted on a seemingly interminable Brexit policy merry-go-round, which finally ended in early 2021 with ratification of a Brexit deal by the European Parliament.

Perhaps one of the most surreal events on the US political scene over the past six years was the FBI’s search of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August, 2022, which was the latest episode in the seemingly never ending Trump saga. Like so many other Trump-related events, this event significantly overshadowed many productive public policy innovations and undercut opportunities for bipartisan collaboration. Bill Hemmer, co-anchor of Fox’s program America’s Newsroom, aptly described the event as crack for cable news. Predictably, the media seized on the opportunity to spin new fantasies about Trump and recycle old ones.

To put it another way, this inflated drama has delivered weapons of mass distraction, to use a term coined by Dr. Cornell West. And there have been plenty of distractions, with talk of conspiracy theories, disinformation, fake news, and debunked contentions constantly swirling in the media and political atmosphere, causing head spinning confusion and chaos. In fact, an increasing number of them have been inverted or simply vanish into the ether like UFOs. Dan Henninger, deputy editorial page editor for the Wall Street Journal, sums up this political pandemic best- Washington has become a round-the-clock supplier of manufactured realities. He contends that political figures of different parties routinely dispense alternate realities.

Perhaps the height of farce with the disinformation saga was reached when a proposed Disinformation Board of the Biden administration temporarily imploded due to purported disinformation. Further evidence of smoke and mirrors emanating from the disinformation funhouse came when some of the biggest purveyors of disinformation railed against the ills of disinformation at a disinformation conference organized by the Atlantic Council in April 2022. All these distractions have had a tendency of overshadowing substantive policies and political innovation programs and models, leaving much of the public dizzy and more skeptical of government’s capability to deliver real solutions.

Even seemingly reasonable medical observations supported by data have been hurled into the vortex of pandemic disinformation, only to resurface later as approved facts when uttered by anointed authorities. As Fox news contributor Lisa Boothe observed regarding highly charged medical contentions about the pandemic, yesterday’s conspiracy theory is often today’s truth.

Indeed, skepticism about the validity of many policies and guidelines established by the US’s CDC agency initially regarding the COVID pandemic has been shown to be warranted over the past two years. In August, 2022, Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, made an astonishing, but long overdue admission that the agency made some pretty dramatic mistakes in its COVID pandemic response, though she drew different conclusions about key future policies from most of her critics. This reflects the severe deficiencies of an ossified public health bureaucracy, including its lack of nimbleness, faulty COVID tests, data failures, and its tendency to be overly influenced by political considerations, in adequately responding to a crisis like the COVID pandemic.

Perhaps the height of farce was reached with the disinformation saga when a proposed Disinformation Board of the Biden administration temporarily imploded due to purported disinformation. Further evidence of smoke and mirrors emanating from the disinformation funhouse came when some of the biggest purveyors of disinformation railed against the ills of disinformation at a disinformation conference organized by the Atlantic Council in April 2022. All these distractions have had a tendency of overshadowing substantive policies and political innovation programs and models, leaving much of the public dizzy and more skeptical of government’s capability to deliver real solutions.

Media inflated politics has increasingly devolved into theater of the absurd. This phenomenon was highlighted in an exchange between Fox White House reporter Peter Doocy and former White House Press Secretary Jen Tsaki in 2021 regarding illegal immigrants being transported to locations across the US in the middle of the night. In a flippant tone, Tsaki corrected Doocy, saying the immigrants arrived early in the morning, appearing more like an actress in a Saturday Night Live skit than a leader of a real press conference. If you thought this was surreal and fodder for a dystopian series on Netflix, you’re not alone.

This atmosphere has tended to obscure innovative policies and tools from diverse ends of the political spectrum that are increasingly converging, and offering more hopeful solutions to vexing political, economic, and social problems. In that context, this book is designed to highlight such policies and the political entrepreneurs and innovators that are driving that transformation on many levels of government and outside government. Some of that change relates to efforts at dramatic restructuring of government institutions. In fact, former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was so intent on revolutionizing the government and reducing the size and power of the Italian parliament he was dubbed the demolition man. (Considerable backlash ultimately stymied many of his key reform efforts.)

Political entrepreneurship and exponential innovation in government can help reframe disruption in government away from the incendiary tactics and strategies of rabid populists. In any case, these new policies demonstrate that politics doesn’t need to become a zero sum game and voting and policymaking shouldn’t be reduced to binary choices, especially as independent voters have more sway. The percentage of independent voters in the US continues to rise, and that trend is expected to be maintained for another 15 years, according to the 2020 Independents Report released by the Open Primaries Education Fund. A Gallup poll indicated that independents represented 36% of the US electorate in the fall of 2020. Unsurprisingly, the surge in independents has been a boon to political reform groups, who’ve sought to tailor in some ways their programs and policies to independents.

The book devotes special attention to the rise in alternative political channels, especially such innovative centrist think tanks as No Labels and Third Way, which have succeeded in elevating political dialogue across political parties and ideologies, and crafting more robust, enduring political policies. Some of these think tanks have not only brought politicians from different political persuasions together, but also mobilized citizen participation in new ways. The response to the Coronavirus Stimulus proposal advocated by the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus inspired by No Labels in the US highlights the growing influence and prominence of alternative political actors and channels in politics and government. The proposal, which called for stimulus funding of $1.5 trillion, encompassing additional stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, and help for small businesses and schools, received considerable media attention and support from key political actors, eventually helped lead to the coronavirus relief plan passed by Congress in Jan. 2021.

The trend towards more holistic approaches to government and political and social problems is accelerating, also fueling government transformation. A prime example of this trend is the bipartisan First Step Act prison reform bill passed in the US in 2018.

Historically, governments have tended to establish departments and offices to address long-term challenges in a more circumscribed manner. More recently, broad innovation functions that were once the main province of business and technology have migrated to the government sector, as evidenced by the establishment of Chief Innovation Officer positions in such cities as San Francisco and Philadelphia and the establishment of the Office of Policy Innovation and the Future in Maine. Unlike past innovation functions in government, many of the more recent innovations and future officers and offices apply innovation techniques more broadly in government, beyond just technology and military issues.

Myriad opportunities are opening for new approaches to government due to the rapidly changing nature of government, as collaborative government, digital government, and e-residency become more significant factors worldwide. As this book suggests, some elements of conventional government transformation may be adapted from certain government and democracy models of actors outside conventional politics, such as virtual nations and futurist political parties. Those models, which typically involve major changes in voting and decision-making practices in government, include distributed government and delegative democracies. In fact, it’s likely in the next decade that many governments will synthesize diverse emergent forms of government and democracy at different times and for different purposes.

On the surface, it may seem like such diverse politicians as French President Emmanuel Macron and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey have little in common, but, in fact, they are both prime examples of political entrepreneurs that are employing innovation techniques and strategies from the business world in government. As political entrepreneurs, they have taken calculated risks, placing big bets in a sense on such new technologies as artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, forming new and more diverse partnerships, and generally creating new ecosystems for technology businesses in their country and state, respectively, to help generate greater economic growth.

It’s clear that a growing number of politicians and political thinkers on the left and the right are expressing dissatisfaction with conventional policies on political, economic, and social issues, and distrust with unfettered capitalism and socialism. Perhaps one of the most striking examples of convergence in policy themes between the left and the right is the increasing focus on notions of the common good from different ends of the political spectrum, as exemplified in Gar Alperovitz’s concept of community wealth building and Senator Marco Rubio’s advocacy of common good capitalism. This book will explore how this growing convergence of themes and views can help fuel potent government transformation.

One of the key trends in government, public policy, and political innovation is the development of multi-level experimentation spanning the physical and digital worlds and many levels of government, politics, and society. A number of governments over the past few decades created special agencies and units to foster greater experimentation and disruption, such as Experimental Finland, MindLab in Denmark, and CoLab in Alberta. Some of