{"id":28083,"date":"2018-11-11T21:35:48","date_gmt":"2018-11-12T02:35:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/open-innovation-in-the-public-sector-the-argentinean-case\/"},"modified":"2018-11-11T21:35:48","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T02:35:48","slug":"open-innovation-in-the-public-sector-the-argentinean-case","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/open-innovation-in-the-public-sector-the-argentinean-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Open innovation in the Public Sector: The Argentinean case"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Open innovation in the Public Sector: The Argentinean case<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Relevance of open innovation for the public sector<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else\u201d (Lakhani and Panetta, 2006).<\/p>\n<p>While governments have to deal with many of the most pressing issues of our era, their organizations are often not prepared to nurture innovation and implement disruptive solutions. To make things worse, most governments are not able to pay competitive salaries (i.e.: the CIO of the $54bi National Pension Fund of Argentina receives a before tax salary of ~$42.000 per year) and career advancement is impeded by \u201cpolitical cycles\u201d (i.e.: every four to six years a new president is elected, forcing most of the officers to leave).<\/p>\n<p>Also, open innovation processes help organizations reach people and resources beyond their usual area of influence and align their own decision makers. This is especially true in governments, which are intrinsically heterogeneous and are concentrated in a small part of their areas of influence (i.e.: capital cities).<\/p>\n<p>That is why open innovation is critical to overcome the limitations of the public administration when it comes to improve processes and develop new policies.<\/p>\n<p><strong>How Argentina is dealing with this opportunity<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In a context of severe constrains, the new national authorities are working hard to help Argentina converge and close the technological gap that the country suffers after more than 12 years of protectionism.<\/p>\n<p>In this spirit, President Macri formed the Ministry of Modernization under the leadership of Minister Ibarra.<\/p>\n<p>Minister Ibarra created the Office of the Undersecretary of Public Innovation and Open Government to foster cross collaboration and nurture open innovation as a source and a resource for policy makers.<\/p>\n<p>This office is in charge of four main policies:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>gob.ar:<\/strong> it is a \u201claboratory to design public policies\u201d that helps the governments of the provinces and the national ministries organize open innovation processes such as challenges and contests. It also helps the selected teams to pursue their ideas by providing resources and networking across the whole country and the region.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Public Policy Design Academy<\/strong>: it is an institute that seeks to develop entrepreneurial and innovative public servants and prepare them to interact with the broader population through trainings, \u201cinnovation marathons\u201d, research, executive programs and the participation of experts and leaders in several subject matters.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Open Government Partnership: <\/strong>it is the interface of the government with civil society organizations to foster transparency and public-private collaboration.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Open Data: <\/strong>they generate datasets and analytical tools for the scientific community and the broader society. Entrepreneurs greatly benefit from open data and many companies use this information to develop their products (for instance, transportation start-ups use data on public transportation to develop their models).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In the short term, they are working on \u201cquick wins\u201d on those four areas. For instance, Lab.gob.ar is organizing \u201cINNOVA\u201d, open innovation challenges to solve problems that the governments face. They are constantly reforming the format and dynamics of those events based on their learnings (for instance, at the very beginning they organized hackathons but now they organize longer processes where the participants offer deeper solutions to the problems at hand).<\/p>\n<p>In the long term, they are working on the \u201cArgentina 2030\u201d plan. However, most of what they do has a rather short-term focus. The main underlying reason is that the \u201cplanning horizon\u201d is four years (i.e.: the presidential term) so officers place a premium on short-term impact. Even though this might be sub-optimal, the reality is that usually presidential successions many initiatives and policies end up being terminated.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Improvement opportunities<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Open innovation is a priority for the national government and it is making bold progress. However, there is still a long way to go. For instance, the Innova challenges do not receive support from private companies, they take a long bureaucratic process (~6 months to be approved) and they have problems recruiting relevant external subject matter experts to collaborate. Also, budget and human resources constraint the number of initiatives that are pursued by the Ministry.<\/p>\n<p>The short political cycle also impedes longer-term initiatives (such as developing longer-term relationships with other stakeholders like universities and NGOs)<\/p>\n<p>To address those issues, I think that the ministry could develop many more relationships with key stakeholders in the private and the non-for-profit sectors. For instance, NGOs such as EMPREAR have deep expertise when organizing open innovation processes. They have organized many hackathons in partnership with municipal governments of the Buenos Aires area, attracting the sponsorship of leading companies such as Microsoft.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Open questions<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Looking forward, I wonder how they might nurture meaningful relationships with other stakeholders to overcome their limitations. Also, it would be interesting to know more about what incentive structures could be put in place so that the Ministry can start working on longer-term initiatives, regardless of the political cycle.<\/p>\n<p>(799 words)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>B. Bergvall-Kareborn and D. Howcroft. Crowdsourcing and open innovation: A study of Amazon Mechanical Turk and Apple iOS. Presented at the 6th ISPIM Innovation Symposium \u2013 Innovation in the Asian Century, Melbourne, Australia (December 2013).<\/li>\n<li>K. Boudreau and K. Lakhani. How to manage outside. MIT Sloan Management Review 50, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 68\u201376.<\/li>\n<li>K. Boudreau and K. Lakhani. Using the crowd as an innovation partner. 性视界 Business Review 91, no. 4 (April 2013): 61\u201369.<\/li>\n<li>J. Howe. The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired (June 2006).<\/li>\n<li>A. King and K. Lakhani. Using open innovation to identify the best ideas. MIT Sloan Management Review 55, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 41\u201348.<\/li>\n<li>K. Lakhani and J. Panetta. The principles of distributed innovation. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 2, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 97\u2013112.<\/li>\n<li>https:\/\/www.argentina.gob.ar\/modernizacion (last access: 11\/10\/2018)<\/li>\n<li>https:\/\/www.argentina.gob.ar\/modernizacion\/gobiernoabierto (last access: 11\/10\/2018)<\/li>\n<li>Image: verdict.co.uk (last access: 11\/10\/2018)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While governments have to deal with many of the most pressing issues of our era, their organizations are often not prepared to nurture innovation and implement disruptive solutions. To make things worse, most governments are not able to pay competitive salaries. In this article we will explore how the Argentinean government leverages open innovation processes to improve policy making<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11623,"featured_media":28087,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[74,4239,2483],"class_list":["post-28083","hck-submission","type-hck-submission","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crowd-sourcing","category-open-innovation","category-policy","hck-taxonomy-organization-argentinean-ministry-of-modernization","hck-taxonomy-industry-public-administration","hck-taxonomy-country-argentina"],"connected_submission_link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/assignment\/rc-tom-challenge-2018\/","yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Open innovation in the Public Sector: The Argentinean case - Technology and Operations Management<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/open-innovation-in-the-public-sector-the-argentinean-case\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Open innovation in the Public Sector: The Argentinean case - Technology and Operations Management\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"While governments have to deal with many of the most pressing issues of our era, their organizations are often not prepared to nurture innovation and implement disruptive solutions. 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