Geoscience Reference
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changing conditions, and maintaining its authoritative status. Innovation can be
thought of as “the conversion of knowledge and ideas into a benefit, which may
be for commercial use or for the public good.”
1
For the purposes of EPA, the
committee is using the term
innovation
as a new means by which to achieve
enhancements to environmental and public health at reduced private-sector and
public-sector costs. It is essential for EPA to identify and focus on desired out-
comes rather than being tied to established processes, procedures, or routines; a
fundamental lesson from research on business innovation is that the process is
best served by a focus on outcomes.
The simplest measures of success are advances toward goals like cleaner
air or safer drinking water, which are most often guided by legislation. Given
the scarcity of resources for environmental protection and given the concern for
income and employment, EPA has an interest in the private-sector and public-
sector costs of achieving health and environmental goals. For EPA, innovation
can be measured in such outcomes as direct benefits to health and the environ-
ment or in reductions in private-sector and public-sector costs of achieving these
outcomes. Continuing to strive to create and promote new processes, tools, and
technologies can advance such outcomes. The agency can be innovative in rela-
tion to health and the environment by influencing current business and govern-
ment practices via technology transfer and education.
US Environmental Protection Agency Supporting Innovation
EPA has done much in the past to support the development of innovative
ideas in portions of its activities. One example is the development of ways of
evaluating and using rapidly emerging biologic testing, as described in Chapter
3. Another is the recent launch of an internal competition called Pathfinder In-
novation Projects, which promotes innovation in the agency (EPA 2011c). The
program received 117 proposals from almost 300 scientists after its first call for
proposals and, after an external peer-review process, funded 12 initial projects
(Preuss 2011). Such programs as Design for the Environment, the agency's re-
cent efforts to crowdsource some questions through the Innocentive Web site
(described in the section “Identifying New Ways to Collaborate” below), and
new technologies in hydroinformatics are examples of efforts to identify innova-
tive solutions. In addition, the federal government's Open Government Initiative
and its Challenge.Gov Web site are encouraging innovation in all agencies.
Those efforts, however, have not been systematic, and they have not been de-
veloped strategically to encourage the much larger potential innovation that
could come from the private sector.
When the outcomes are of mutual interest, the agency can help to support
and encourage private-sector innovation to serve its desired outcomes in several
systematic ways. First, agency scientists generally have a broad view of emerg-
1
http://www.creativeadvantage.com/innovation-definition.aspx
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