A New Model for Public Sector Innovation Accelerator

Challenge

Our client, a public sector entity, identified a need to expand one of its innovation programs with a sustainable and replicable model to channel program projects from promising early-stage concepts to proven solutions with clear value propositions and avenues to scale in their organization.

Approach

HRG partnered with our client and a leading academic institution to develop a one-year pilot program for innovation teams with high-potential projects, including:

  • Building a comprehensive program support infrastructure, including faculty, independent advisors, co-location team events, and program governance boards to mentor teams and track pilot program success metrics

  • Providing regular project management support to help each team identify and update key project milestones, enabling innovators to proactively mitigate risks, identify important breakthroughs, and prioritize efforts on highest impact tasks

  • Validating milestone budgets and purchasing prototyping equipment, parts, and software to advance team progress along development roadmap

After aligning on our design and approach with key stakeholders, including external subject matter experts who served as program faculty and independent advisors, we launched the pilot, progressively adding features to the program in response to feedback from advisors and teams.

Impact

The pilot developed a successful blueprint for a project accelerator, advancing three high-impact projects that addressed critical, niche problems using cutting-edge technologies. During the pilot, all teams tested their solutions using synthetic data, used insights to iterate on their designs, and are now well-positioned to secure additional seed funding to deploy and scale in our client’s network. Compared to their peers in previous cohorts, the participants in our pilot made substantially greater progress toward developing scalable solutions for our client’s organization and experienced significantly less dropout from team members and projects.

As a result, the pilot has further cemented our client’s reputation as a vanguard for innovation in their organization and has bolstered crucial support from senior leadership for their project portfolio.