By Karen Thoreson

Each year, the Alliance for Innovation receives scores of applications for its Innovation Awards program. And each year, we enjoy struggling with which applications should win the two top awards—the Robert Havlick Award and the Thomas Muehlenbeck Award.

This year we had nearly 70 submissions, but the following two rushed to the top of every reviewer's list. Let me tell you about our winners and their incredible, innovative projects.

The Park District of Oak Park, Illinois:

Launch Pad Wins the Muehlenbeck Award

The Park District of Oak Park, Illinois (population 52,066) had a goal of engaging its staff in submitting new ideas for improvements to its operations and services. Staff members had established a task force out of their 2014 retreat that looked at how idea generators were being undertaken in both the public and private sectors.

That team evaluated what factors led to sustained success and what pitfalls to avoid. As a result, they created a program called Launch Pad and it was rolled out to Park District staff in 2015.

Launch Pad not only lets staff submit ideas, but it also allows staff to work as a team to help refine, add to, and support ideas. Some ideas already implemented include hiring practices, marketing strategies, data collection, customer service health and wellness, park features, and community engagement.

The tool adapted by staff is a basic support and ticketing software service that staff members modified themselves without outside help.

They found that many government innovation programs that allow input and ideas from staff were application-based programs with funding awarded after a formal review and selection process. Launch Pad makes the process of submitting and vetting ideas more interactive and inclusive by:

• Making idea submission quick and easy because good ideas might be forgotten if they are not quickly captured or not submitted at all if the process is too onerous.
• Encouraging not just "innovations that needed funding," but also small ideas and simple quick fixes so that the park district didn't miss out on good ideas and improvements that staff members might not have thought were innovative enough.
• Recognizing that individual strengths in developing and implementing ideas are different. Some are great at generating ideas but not following them through, and others aren't great at coming up with new ideas but are great at refining them. So there are opportunities to participate in a number of ways.
• Allowing participation and discussion from all levels of the organization and cross-department, including the ability to submit an idea completely outside of one's job or team.

All park district staff are introduced to Launch Pad as part of their new employee orientation. The program provides an opportunity for equal participation from all levels of the organization, and an idea from a lifeguard is given as much consideration as one from a department head.

Also, when staff members submit an idea, they have the option to let the Innovation Team know if they'd like to be involved in its rollout (if the idea is selected), which can lead to new leadership opportunities for staff.

Several ideas have involved developing and expanding partnerships with other organizations, ranging from the creation and installation of tree tags by local middle school students to working to install solar-powered charging stations in four parks.

The Launch Pad program is easily replicated by other agencies based on ease of implementation and low cost to get started. Oak Park has posted information on the initial pilot of the program on its website at www.pdop.org/innovation#ideas_text for others to reference.

In the two years since the program launched, 292 ideas have been posted, 458 comments made, 863 votes cast, and 29 ideas completed. The initiatives launched were spread across the organization, with every department in the organization involved.

Beyond the actual work accomplished through the Launch Pad program, it has also been part of an overall culture change. During staff interviews and workshops in 2012 for their previous strategic plan, staff specifically listed "innovation" as an opportunity for improvement. When updating the 2015 strategic plan, staff listed "innovative culture and progressive mentality" as a strength.

City of Las Vegas, Nevada:

Artificial Intelligence at City Hall Wins the Havlick Award

First, I admit that I have retitled this project, which was originally named "Asset Evaluation Using Voice-Activated Personal Assistant." I believe that what the city of Las Vegas (population 605,000) has done is a breakthrough and will likely be emulated across the country.

Amazon Alexa is a personal assistant designed to make life easier by having a convenient way to get information, which is simply talking to the Echo device. Las Vegas leveraged Amazon's Alexa to undertake certain rote tasks for its organization and then took it much further. Starting in the information technology department, the original idea was to have Alexa answer frequently asked questions from residents, including where city facilities are located or what are the hours of operation.

Through development, staff members realized that Alexa could handle more complex queries and set to work enabling the voice-activated platform to answer questions on the status of a permit, for example, and to also provide up-to-date "flash" information on events.

The team added a gamification element, which helps users learn more about the city in an entertaining way by having Alexa pose questions in a brief quiz to assess their knowledge of the city.

Exploring Alexa's capabilities further, its custom skills were combined with the city's streetlight energy usage data to create a way to compile and relay information about malfunctioning streetlights. The solution used statistical analysis to identify which street lights are not consuming energy at night.

Alexa can reduce time and manpower to analyze data from the city's utility provider. The solution automates a pull of the data, runs an analysis, and produces a list of likely faulty streetlights for Alexa to read to a person.

A report is compiled and e-mailed with the total number of faulty streetlights with location, meter identification, and last date of energy usage. The Alexa Skill is maintained in the city's cloud on Microsoft Azure to offer top-class reliability, security and scalability, and to enable every department citywide to participate as a content provider.

Las Vegas is the first local government to extend Alexa's capabilities beyond simple Q&A to deliver top-notch customer service to a public that has grown to expect the convenience of interacting with a personal assistant.

For other jurisdictions to replicate this skill, they need only visit Amazon's site to obtain its Alexa skills kit at https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit. Amazon's Alexa can be acquired for approximately $100 per device.

What's Next?

Both Oak Park and Las Vegas have welcomed inquiries from Alliance members and others regarding how to operationalize projects like theirs. And therein lies the beauty of innovation.

Be an inventor or early adopter. Try something—research, tinker, and make it work better than what you are already doing, prove the results, and then encourage others to replicate and make it even more effective than what you created.

Spreading innovation is our mission, and I am proud that these two award winners have developed projects that any local government (or park district!) can apply in their jurisdictions. Try it!

Karen Thoreson is president, Alliance for Innovation, Phoenix, Arizona (kthoreson@transformgov.org).