Innovative Procurement
Solving Market Failures & Creating Industries
Tackling the greatest national challenges facing the United States requires a redoubled commitment to innovation. The United States put astronauts on the moon, split the atom, built the Internet, and sequenced the human genome. But progress has stagnated — and will continue to stagnate if we do not diversify our national approach to innovation. We must not only make investments in emerging technologies, but also experiment with new ways of solving problems.
Learn more about our work to help innovate government procurement below
Procurement Primer
Market-shaping mechanisms (MSMs), also known as “demand pull” mechanisms, are excellent tools for catalyzing solutions-oriented innovation.
Read our MSMs primer to learn more and see several examples and forward-looking use-cases to create a “marketplace of outcomes”.
Talent Support
Looking for knowledgable, creative procurement talent? Want to learn more about flexible hiring mechanisms?
FAS’ Day One Talent Hub works to identify, match, and deploy technical talent into federal agencies to tackle pressing priorities.
Even the best-designed policy rests on assumptions about who will staff it, how it will be funded, whether the responsible institutions have ever coordinated, and if the goals are achievable. Those assumptions usually go unchecked until a program is already struggling, stalled by capacity bottlenecks, overlapping authorities, and other predictable implementation problems. To dig into […]
Congress should establish a Modeling, Analysis, and Technical Talent for Energy Regulation Hub (MATTER Hub) within the Department of Energy (DOE).
The potential implication of these evidence gaps becomes more consequential when you look at how institutions actually make decisions day to day.
Every new institution inherits something – existing incentives, existing staff, decades of prior investment that shaped what’s possible.