"People often feel that they are in a box where the lid is closing. It is hard to execute on ideas in a hierarchical system full of red tape."
-Bryan Sivak, former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Health and Human Services (HHS)
Summary
Purpose & Outcomes
Purpose: Federal agencies can substantially benefit from having a Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) to serve as a catalyst for change to confront emerging challenges or improve the efficiency of decades-old service delivery processes.
A CINO serves as a beacon for innovation, working to harness, foster, execute, and manage innovative ideas. CINOs are force multipliers: these innovators teach and enable others, and spotlight staff doing or wanting to do innovative work. The role is also inherently flexible and sometimes includes ambiguous boundaries. A CINO’s portfolio may be defined around an agency’s priority needs. In broad terms, CINOs:
Reframe problems to change thinking patterns
Connect people and break down silos
Celebrate innovative work within an agency, which encourages more of it
CINOs can be valuable assets for working to make an agency’s priorities real, from leading agency-wide initiatives, addressing employee engagement and culture change, tapping employee ideas in innovative ways, and sometimes leading efforts to change core underlying processes and improve performance and efficiency.
Appointing a CINO can result in persistent, high-value benefits for agency leadership because the CINO’s top priority is to focus on innovation and relentlessly drive it forward. These efforts can amplify any senior leadership’s capacity for attaining an agency’s mission. In times of tight budgets, CINOs act as change agents to transform an agency’s operations.
Examples
Bryan Sivak launched several new programs that sit within HHS IDEA Lab including the HHS Ignite Accelerator and the Entrepreneur-in-Residence program, which brings external talent into HHS for a tour-of-duty (Source: Interview with Bryan Sivak by Policy Design Lab, July 27, 2016).
For Chris Gerdes, just getting staff talking about and appreciating new approaches has been a significant step in shifting the Department of Transportation (DOT) culture – and approaches that may seem trivial can have big impacts. For example, Gerdes began carving out a few minutes in the senior leaders’ weekly agency meeting to spotlight staff doing innovative work. When Monday morning meetings began acknowledging and celebrating that new approaches were important and were succeeding, he received very positive feedback (Source: Interview with Chris Gerdes by Policy Design Lab, July 1, 2016).
Having a separate innovation team like the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Global Development Lab generates more critical mass, bringing together best practices, and helping to evangelize across the organization. “It’s much harder,” former CINO Ann Mei Chang observed, “When people are trying to work in isolation to push the boulder up a hill rather than having a team and space to innovate together.” (Source: Interview with Ann Mei Chang by Policy Design Lab, July 7, 2016).
Matthew Dunne led The Quiet Clean Energy Innovation Revolution at the Department of Energy. He found Senior Executive Service (SES) employees support vital. When they authorize the employees they manage to invest time in innovative activities, such as participation in communities of practice (CoP) (Source: Interview with Matthew Dunne by Policy Design Lab, July 18, 2016).
Approach
There is no single definition for CINO roles; senior leaders have created and defined this role in the ways that best address their agency’s needs.
In all cases, agencies must have a clear understanding of a CINO’s mission, role, and authority within an agency, in order to attract the most qualified candidates and to enable them to succeed. Sometimes it may be more appropriate to promote operational innovation by designating an innovation “home” in key functional roles such as human resources (HR), legal, and acquisition.
In other contexts where the top priorities involve technology integration and deployment, a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) may also be a suitable leadership home for an innovation portfolio. Some agencies designate their Chief Information Officer (CIO) as the lead for identifying and implementing innovative activities.
For CINOs or any leader tasked with overseeing innovation, the position must have clear authority and direction to fully realize their potential impact.
Actions and Considerations
Federal agencies may wish to consider the following when establishing a CINO position:
Checklist for defining the CINO’s role
Guidance and various pathways for hiring
Implementation insights for setting up a CINO to succeed
Sample job description
Sourcing CINO candidates
Traits of effective CINOs
Defining the CINO’s role is critical. Once it is defined, an agency can better determine the job description, and which characteristics are most important in hiring candidates.
This checklist helps define the CINO’s role:
Clarify vision. Ask yourself why you decided to hire someone for this role. What are you trying to achieve? Are you willing to make this a fundamentally important role in your agency? Articulate your answers; it’s an essential step for clarification. If you’re just checking the box, then your innovation attempts will fail.
Establish clear goals. At the outset, clearly define the CINO role, its expectations, and the measurements. Consider working with your incoming CINO to fully focus their job description.
Remain flexible. An inherent amount of flexibility is essential. Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg stated in What It Really Means to be an Innovation Officer, “By now, it is widely recognized that if you are developing a new idea, you have to stay flexible in the beginning and be ready to deviate from the original plan. What fewer people realize is that this is equally true when you establish innovation units. Marry yourself too firmly to a specific setup, model, or metric at the outset, and trouble will soon ensue.” (Source: Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, “What it Really Means to be a Chief Innovation Officer,” Harvard Business Review, December 5, 2014). In a spirit of continuous learning, agency leaders may consider how to re-visit and re-evaluate the CINO’s job responsibilities.
Under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA), personnel from other federal agencies, state and local governments, colleges and universities, Indian tribal governments, federally funded research and development centers (e.g., national laboratories), and other eligible organizations can be recruited to serve in a temporary position. The initial term can be up to two years, but it can be extended for another two years. The assignment may be reimbursable (e.g., the host agency reimburses all salary costs, travel, and administrative costs) or non-reimbursable.
Agencies do not take full advantage of the IPA program that, if used strategically, can help agencies meet their needs for hard-to-fill positions such as information technology and nurses.
IPAs are cumbersome to use and require OPM approval.
Agencies do not need OPM approval to make assignments under the IPA authority. Federal agencies interested in using the authority simply enter into a written agreement.
IPAs are expensive to use.
Agencies may enter into IPA assignments on a reimbursable or non-reimbursable basis. This means they may be cost-neutral to federal agencies. Whether an IPA assignment is reimbursable is determined by the agency and non-federal entity involved in the assignment.
An agency may only enter into an IPA agreement with a state government entity.
An agency may enter into an IPA agreement with state and local governments, institutions of higher education, and Indian tribal governments.
Agencies receive no recruitment benefit from sending employees on IPA assignments.
Federal employees serving in IPA assignments can serve as both recruiters and ambassadors for positions in your agency. For example, federal nurses sent to colleges and universities as teachers/instructors can inspire students about federal employment and encourage them to consider employment with your agency via the Pathways Program. This results in a win-win for the academic institution as well as your agency.
An agency may document IPA assignments for full-time employment only.
An agency may document IPA assignments for intermittent, part-time, and full-time employment.
Hiring a Chief Innovation Officer
Summary
Purpose & Outcomes
Purpose: Federal agencies can substantially benefit from having a Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) to serve as a catalyst for change to confront emerging challenges or improve the efficiency of decades-old service delivery processes.
A CINO serves as a beacon for innovation, working to harness, foster, execute, and manage innovative ideas. CINOs are force multipliers: these innovators teach and enable others, and spotlight staff doing or wanting to do innovative work. The role is also inherently flexible and sometimes includes ambiguous boundaries. A CINO’s portfolio may be defined around an agency’s priority needs. In broad terms, CINOs:
CINOs can be valuable assets for working to make an agency’s priorities real, from leading agency-wide initiatives, addressing employee engagement and culture change, tapping employee ideas in innovative ways, and sometimes leading efforts to change core underlying processes and improve performance and efficiency.
Appointing a CINO can result in persistent, high-value benefits for agency leadership because the CINO’s top priority is to focus on innovation and relentlessly drive it forward. These efforts can amplify any senior leadership’s capacity for attaining an agency’s mission. In times of tight budgets, CINOs act as change agents to transform an agency’s operations.
Examples
Approach
There is no single definition for CINO roles; senior leaders have created and defined this role in the ways that best address their agency’s needs.
In all cases, agencies must have a clear understanding of a CINO’s mission, role, and authority within an agency, in order to attract the most qualified candidates and to enable them to succeed. Sometimes it may be more appropriate to promote operational innovation by designating an innovation “home” in key functional roles such as human resources (HR), legal, and acquisition.
In other contexts where the top priorities involve technology integration and deployment, a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) may also be a suitable leadership home for an innovation portfolio. Some agencies designate their Chief Information Officer (CIO) as the lead for identifying and implementing innovative activities.
For CINOs or any leader tasked with overseeing innovation, the position must have clear authority and direction to fully realize their potential impact.
Actions and Considerations
Federal agencies may wish to consider the following when establishing a CINO position:
Defining the CINO’s role is critical. Once it is defined, an agency can better determine the job description, and which characteristics are most important in hiring candidates.
This checklist helps define the CINO’s role:
Under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA), personnel from other federal agencies, state and local governments, colleges and universities, Indian tribal governments, federally funded research and development centers (e.g., national laboratories), and other eligible organizations can be recruited to serve in a temporary position. The initial term can be up to two years, but it can be extended for another two years. The assignment may be reimbursable (e.g., the host agency reimburses all salary costs, travel, and administrative costs) or non-reimbursable.
IPA is a powerful but commonly misunderstood policy. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) encourages agencies to re-think the following IPA myths and misconceptions:
Policies
Resources