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Please join the City of San José, The Aerospace Corporation, the Mineta Transportation Institute, and the National Academy of Public Administration for the Public Sector Innovation Workshop, a gathering of industry, government agency, academic, and community leaders seeking a means to accelerate the application of technological innovation to transportation, energy, the environment, and many other collective-needs issues of national importance.

National leaders are increasingly pointing to large-scale innovation as a crucial component in determining the U.S. economic and employment outlook. However, innovation in the public sector is challenging:

• Taxpayers want to ensure tax dollars are spent wisely
• Municipalities are limited by ever-tighter budgets at the federal, state, and local levels, and are in no position to assume the risks associated with adopting advanced technology
• Collectively, the public sector lacks the means to effectively work with the private sector to conceive and drive the development of potentially useful advanced, large-scale technical systems

How do we mitigate the financial and technical risks associated with innovation? How might reducing risks to the public sector also entice the private sector to invest in technology development and commercialization? How do we overcome institutional barriers to responsibly advance complex solutions to pressing community problems?

• Engage participants in a discussion of an institutional framework to accelerate public sector innovation – what it might look like, how it would work, and what steps would need to be taken to move it and the innovations they seek to support forward.
• Discuss how this framework can identify, reduce and manage risk and bring more private investment to the table for collective-needs issues – effectively extending public-private partnerships to the technology development process itself.
• Establish a set of next steps that participants might take to further explore and begin implementing such a framework for the critical public-sector needs that they have identified – whether they involve technical innovation or not.

The findings from San José’s recently concluded study of automated transit will be used to illustrate both the current challenges faced by public agencies in pursuing innovative technology and a potential path forward for this and other innovative technological solutions.

For more details visit the conference website.