In President-elect Barack Obama’s technology and innovation fact sheet, he pledged to appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The CTO’s duty, Obama outlined, is to “ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies, and services for the 21st century.”

The establishment of a U.S. CTO is long overdue as business media outlets are continually reporting that the United States is losing its competitive edge, inadequately prepared to combat cyber threats, and lagging behind in innovation.

But, a CTO is not enough.

As Bruce Nussbaum said recently in his BusinessWeek.com blog, Nussbaum on Design, “(Obama) actually needs to appoint a Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) because change is as much about sociology as technology, as much about creativity as science.”

He’s absolutely right. We’re facing complex, new economic challenges and we need more than technological innovations. We need some who possesses the necessary skills to lead the government in collaboration, ideation, implementation, and value creation.

The job of the CIO would be to inject a culture of creativity and innovation into all the different government agencies and bureaucracies. The CIO will help each agency define value as it applies to a rapidly evolving economic environment; bust through inertia; encourage brainstorming of relevant and scalable ideas; drive the implementation of those ideas; break down or bridge silos; and find and leverage the wisdom in disagreement in order to develop plans that will be easily approved and implemented.

Obama’s entire campaign was about “Change We Can Believe in.” A CIO will help the United States capitalize on every opportunity to change for the better.

http://innovation.fleishmanhillard.com/?p=1503

– FHInnovation!