What Happens at the President's Innovation Cohort?

Tuesday's news that the White House is forming a chief technology officers' council shed light on a seldom-discussed group: the President's Innovation Cohort.

The new CTO council -- it doesn't have an official name yet -- will be a place for appointed and career CTOs to hash out common problems, likely on a monthly basis, Veterans Affairs CTO Peter Levin told Nextgov.

It will also augment the innovation cohort, a group of political appointees "who have technology or innovation in their titles," he said.

The innovation cohort has existed since 2009 but largely flown under the radar. One of the few official mentions is in a 2011 memo from then-federal CTO Aneesh Chopra who described the cohort's goal as "surfacing leading practices for open innovation [and] inspiring the public sector to move toward a culture of possibility."

By coincidence, U.S. Agency for International Development Chief Innovation Officer Maura O'Neill dug a bit deeper into how the cohort operates in an interview with Nextgov last week.

"We run it in a very interesting way," she said. "I come and for the first 15 or 20 minutes I present the problem I'm having. For 10 minutes people ask questions and for 20 minutes they debate the issue without involving me in the conversation."

Once that process is done, she said, the person who brought the problem to the group is able to ask questions and respond.

"It makes for an interesting conversation," she said. "It's a very interesting way to assess a problem."

Levin credited the cohort on Tuesday with helping VA clear some information-sharing hurdles for introducing its Blue Button personal health record initiative for veterans.

The agency also discussed a USAID idea to use the Education Department's Race to the Top program as a model for sparking innovation in international education, O'Neill said.

"We also talk about the nuts and bolts of scaling within a government agency," she said. "How do you get the incentives right? How do you retool the performance system so people are incentivized to innovate? How do you get the interagency to not stifle innovations? We have a lot of the same issues in each of our agencies and we can talk about particularly smart approaches to them."