The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) Program launched three years ago by US CTO Todd Park is one of the greatest programs we’ve seen to help transform government by applying some of the knowledge and approaches used by our private sector’s top entrepreneurs and innovators. It’s one of the best examples of large scale “Open Gov” approaches, making public data available and useful in a range of key areas. 

What’s particularly interesting – and close to our hearts and minds – is that this year’s announcement includes a specific call to help make the national labs’ technologies and research more available in a user friendly way to US business and entrepreneurs. Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs are actually among the leaders in tech transfer, but we all recognize the process can be improved. While this PIF program will be headquartered in DC with the NNSA, we expect both labs to play key roles in this initiative. 

Since many in our communities have already been thinking – and working – on these very issues, we’d love to see some NM applicants to this important program!

I’ve included the basics below, but for the announcement and more information, please visit:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/03/05/presidential-innovation-fellows-round-3-serve-create-innovate

PRESIDENTIAL INNOVATION FELLOWS PROGRAM

The Presidential Innovation Fellows program brings the principles, values, and practices of the innovation economy into government through the most effective agents of change we know: our people. This highly competitive program pairs talented, diverse individuals from the innovation community with top civil servants to tackle many of our Nation’s biggest challenges, and to achieve a profound and lasting social impact. These teams of government experts and private-sector doers are using approaches like design thinking and lean startup to achieve results for the American people in months, not years.

Data Innovation

The Data Innovation projects focus on accelerating and expanding the Federal Government’s efforts to make information resources more accessible and usable for companies, entrepreneurs, citizens, and others to fuel the creation of new products, services, and jobs. Also within this effort are projects that focus on empowering Americans with secure and useful access to their own personal data—such as their own health or energy usage information—as part of the Administration’s MyData initiatives. The Data Innovation Presidential Innovation Fellows will serve in the following agencies for the following projects:

 
  1. The U.S. Department of Energy

    is working to accelerate the commercialization of National Laboratory-generated technologies, in part by making information about those technologies more easy to find and use.