5.2: Innovation
Promoting Innovation through Participation Other Information:
To access innovative ideas dispersed throughout the Federal workforce and the public at large, we are promoting opportunities
for individuals within and outside government to contribute ideas and expertise to our efforts. As the President has said,
the best ideas often come from front-line staff. We are working with agencies to create effective mechanisms for soliciting,
encouraging, and sharing solutions to longstanding problems and challenges. We launched the President’s SAVE Award last year
to garner ideas on how government can save money and perform better. Federal employees submitted 38,000 ideas, and many are
incorporated in the President’s FY 2011 budget. Based on that success, the President made SAVE an annual event. This year’s
award process is further harnessing the knowledge of Federal employees by asking employees to rank SAVE submissions from their
colleagues to help us identify the most innovative ideas for saving money and increasing efficiency. We are also making it
easier for individuals and organizations to find and more readily access Federal data. We launched Data.gov as a clearing
house of high value data sets, and Federal agencies have already released more than 270,000 datasets. Data.gov has received
nearly 100 million hits from users, and hundreds of applications have been developed from the data sets, including applications
that help parents keep their children safe, let travelers find the fastest routes to their destinations, and inform home buyers
about the safety of their new neighborhood. One example is FlyOnTime.us, which uses data from the Bureau of Transportation
Statistics to allow consumers to find flights with the best records for being on-time.
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