Government Executive August 2012 : Page 28
Wanted: Innovators istration medical device examiners with manufacturers, doctors and academics, with the goal of finding a way to speed the approval process for life-saving stents, artificial joints and similar products. The second program paired experts from the venture capital and tech startup worlds with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees to devise a way the agency could allow more foreign-born entrepreneurs into the country. In May, the White House launched the largest EIR program yet—Presidential Innovation Fellows. The program is modeled partly on Code for America, a nonprofit that pairs eager, young Web developers with cash-strapped cities to use technology to improve city services. Park, who seems always to search for the most explosive phrase he can get away with, describes the fellows as “the bad-dest of the badass innovators.” The 20 fellows have six months to complete five projects each spon-sored by a different agency. Projects include building a system to issue electronic payments rather than cash to people working as subcontractors on U.S.-led development projects in poor nations, as well as a tool to give U.S. citizens secure online access to their medical records. The projects were chosen in what Park Cracking the Code One model for the Presidential Innovation Fellows program is Code for America, a nonprofit that invites eager developers to build applications that help city governments save money and improve services. Here are some of the project’s notable apps: ADOPT-A-HYDRANT WHERE’S MY SCHOOL BUS? (Boston): (Boston): During winter months citizens can volunteer online to dig out fire hydrants buried under snow. This saves firefighters precious minutes trying to find their water sources. A mobile app that allows parents to track their child’s school bus in real time so they don’t have to wait out in the rain or snow. MURALAPP (Philadelphia): A mobile app-based tour of the city’s best murals and other public art that includes information about the artist and neighborhood. SNAPFRESH (nationwide): An application that texts users the nearest businesses that accept Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program credits, commonly known as food stamps, based on their address. called a “cage match” with representa-tives from the interested agencies trying to sell the others on their ideas until only the five best remained. If all goes well, Park says he’d like to continue the pro-gram with new agency-generated projects each year. Presidential Innovation Fellows Program 20 FELLOWS 6 28 MONTH TIMELINE 5 PROJECTS ENTREPRENEURIAL EDGE Reforming the way Citizenship and Immigration Services handles entre-preneurs’ visas seemed like a natural fit for the EIR approach, USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas says. A More than three-fourths of patents awarded to the top 10 patent-producing universities listed at least one foreign-born inventor in 2011, the Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonprofit co-founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, reported in June. Most of those patents were in science, technology and engineering. Yet the visa adjudication system is geared toward traditional jobs at established companies, not bootstrap entrepreneurs with one great idea and some financial backing. Mayorkas gave the 10 agency team members and five entrepreneurs in resi-dence from the tech startup and ven-ture capital worlds three months to sort through training materials and policy guidance to come up with a solution. “When we started off, it was almost like two different groups speaking com-pletely different languages and only half understanding each other,” says Paul Ford, one of the EIRs and vice president for community development at Dallas-based SoftLayer Technologies, a cloud computing provider. “We’d talk incubators and capitaliza-tion tables and the internal team would be using tons of government acronyms,” he says. “We’d look at them like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ It took a couple of weeks before we all started to understand each other. But once that clicked and we started working through all the different visa classes, those aha moments just started happening over and over again.” One of the first problems the team encountered was the issue of control, according to Ford. Most work visas require sponsorship by an employer who will “control the . . . worker’s daily duties,” the statute says. That’s a tricky proposition for an entrepreneur who aims to run her own company. The resident entrepreneurs proposed the idea of treating venture capital boards as the equivalent of bosses, which fits the language of the statute if not its original intent. The control a VC board wields over an entrepreneur isn’t much different from the power an employer exercises over a particularly independent employee, Ford says, especially if it has majority voting rights. There’s also plenty of paperwork to document that control—a critical part of the adjudication process. The EIRs also lobbied for a more lib-eral reading of the requirements for the O-1 visa, reserved for applicants who pos-sess “extraordinary ability” and are “one gov ex ec.com government ex ecutive | august 2012
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