If you want to get a government agency to perform better, fix the incentives.
Maybe true for some government organizations, but not true on the whole.
Governments spend billions (and sometimes trillions) on innovation to compete with each other. Collectively, government programs probably account for 99.99% of all "innovation" spending.
And they have the highest stakes when it comes to being "outcompeted".
The USDS is enabled to succeed in this mission through the support of the Executive Office of the President, the equivalent of corporate executive sponsorship. Culture comes from the top.
https://www.usds.gov/impact-report/2024/
https://www.usds.gov/impact-report/2024/by-the-numbers/
(full disclosure: went through a USDS interview cycle and was extended an offer, no other affiliation)
That sentence is the essence of generic corpo-speak. Doesn't really mean anything without specifics.
Can you really imagine a military that didn't have and celebrate heroes?
If a large organization can't have those that sacrifice themselves and break rules to achieve the greater goal, then they're unlikely to succeed against a significant foe. At the same time communication within large organizations is challenging and leadership is unlikely to know what the challenges at the front line are. Fostering all innovation is as likely to lead to regularly scheduled mediocre "improvements" and "features" that nobody really wants in order to meet whatever metric is in place (to the detriment of what is not explicitly measured).
The argument of the article seems to be, just be so good and well directed by both senior and middle managers that exactly the "right" innovations occur within the process. That likely means those in the trenches aren't getting what they need.
The most effective rapid innovation method I've seen (though painful and challenging to implement) is having separate teams competing to several performance milestones (which allow more generic goals and targeted metrics). At the milestones they share their results and innovations, which competing teams can then use/combine to compete against them. Management needs real goals with known tradeoffs, 2-3x more people than a single team, and it's stressful hitting deadlines knowing that failure is an option. The failure mode is putting all the "best" people on one team which is supposed to win, though I've seen even that get broken by a team of underdog "heroes" who embarrassed the chosen team, and luckily senior management rewarded that.
It's similar to "red" vs "blue" pen-testing or wargaming, but you can have more than 2 teams and the goals can be aligned against the status quo (sometimes a tweaked current solution is the winner).
> All large organizations – both government and corporate—need an innovation doctrine or else risk being outpaced by competitors.
I don’t think the anecdote fits conclusion. The reasons to innovate are many, but being outcompeted is not that salient to, say, an IT person in some agency.