GSA looks to crowdsourcing to fix e-gov travel services
The agency will offer a prize worth up to $25,000 for proposing a better approach to its troubled e-gov program.
The General Services Administration, in the market for a new approach to managing government travel services online, is looking to crowdsource the problem, even offering a prize of up to $25,000 to someone who comes up with a solution.
The E-Gov Travel Service program has been a problem for years, suffering from “administrative and cost overhead burdens” and “very dissatisfied” customers, according to a notice GSA published Feb. 5.
Rather than ship off the typical request for information to the government contractor community, GSA officials are looking for innovation from the public at large -- using what they call an open innovation strategy.
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“The outcome of this effort would shorten innovation cycles, involve our customers, introduce out-of-the-box thinking (or challenge the ‘dominant logic’), increase customer loyalty, and get access to exclusive knowledge and creativity,” the notice states.
GSA plans to hire a contractor to manage the program, setting up the challenge, managing the interaction with participants and awarding the prize. The agency has developed a six-paragraph description of the problem, which will serve as the starting point for the initiative.
The winner, if any is selected, will be required to transfer the intellectual property rights for their idea to GSA.