In 1984, the legendary leaders of the Intel Corporation, Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, were faced with a serious inflection point in their business. They built their company on the foundation of memory chips, but by the early 1980s, the market was being flooded by cheaper Japanese competitors. They had a stark choice to make, either invest 100 million dollars in upgrading their memory chip design and manufacturing or taking a much riskier strategy of investing that capital into developing a new line of microprocessors.
Unable to break the impasse in their minds, Grove suggested a thought experiment. He urged Moore to imagine that instead of being the CEO and President of Intel, they were in charge of a new company that had just acquired Intel. When they walked through the doors for their first day as the new executives in charge, what would they do? Moore’s immediate response was clarifying: their first act would be to fire themselves, and their second would be to invest in microprocessors. When they nervously broke the news to their primary customers, the response was simply, “What took you so long?” Today, Intel is still one of the leading manufacturers of semiconductors in the world due to their willingness to embrace innovation and continuously look at old problems in new ways.
The AIP is advocating that we all engage in a similar exercise. Imagine for a second that we are not in a divided and dysfunctional political process dominated by two bitterly polarized parties. Think about what it would mean if our politics actually focused on solving the problems that confront our society. Picture in your mind a scenario in which we had a real plan in place to increase manufacturing jobs, instead of merely talking about how we could appeal to working-class voters. Also, a plan to reform our health care system by addressing exploding drug prices, improving care access and quality, and dealing with the opioid crisis, instead of spending all of our time talking about how both sides can use that issue to increase their political advantage. Appealing to voters on kitchen table issues is a very different activity than actually solving kitchen table problems.
If we were to apply this thought experiment to our politics, then we would probably come to conclusions not much different than Gordon Moore. We would also immediately fire the existing management and adopt an entirely new approach to solving intractable problems. This is the fundamental question confronting America today: how do we replace the status quo politicians on both sides with real leaders who genuinely want to provide results-based solutions for everyone.
The powerful tool that we can use to make this transition a reality is Innovation. It has worked exponentially well in every field to which it has been applied, and when we have applied it to our political process, as with the US constitution, it has helped drive America’s unparalleled success.
United in Division
The only issue that seems to unify nearly all Americans – Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, Trump voters and Clinton voters – is how disturbingly divided we are as a nation. According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, a staggering 80% of US adults believe that we are either “mainly” or “totally” divided. Further, 90% of respondents in the same survey consider the bitter divisions between Democrats and Republicans as either a “serious” or “very serious” problem. The study concluded with a stark reminder of how difficult this problem is. When both sides were asked who was responsible for the division and dysfunction, they each had the same response: the ‘other’ side was to blame.
Given those results, it is not surprising that according to a recent Pew survey 61% of Americans believe that “significant changes” are urgently needed to the underlying “design and structure” of the U.S. political process. The quarrel between the left and right has been raging for 2,400 years and is no closer to being resolved today than it was over two millennia ago. Americans overwhelming recognize the need to bridge our differences and bring our politics into the modern age.
What political innovation is and how we apply it
The biggest casualty of our divided and dysfunctional political war is the loss of our ability to have an intelligent conversation on nearly every subject. This is the heart of our current quagmire. Just like a software program with a glitch, until this fatal flaw is repaired, our political process will not function properly. Further, it has prevented meaningful reform and solutions even in areas where the vast majority of Americans want reform: health care, immigration, education, infrastructure, environmental protection and manufacturing. Additionally, given the current crop of candidates vying for the Democratic nomination, it is clear that nothing will truly change, even if the party occupying the White House does. Innovation is the mechanism that can get our dialogue and political process back on track.
There are two layers of the status quo that innovation will empower us to overcome. The first is the macro level in which the American political process merely gyrates back and forth between left and right, Republican and Democrat, with nothing substantial changing no matter who is in charge. After all, repeatedly doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is, in a word, insane. Secondly, on the micro level, the continuous decline in our debate, non-stop infighting, and lack of focus on solutions leave us unable to look at old problems in new ways. Doubling or tripling down on the tired, old, failed ideas of the past has not and will never lead to solutions. We need to break the bondage of the status quo on both levels to make meaningful improvements.
The AIP is the solution to the macro challenge because it empowers us to go beyond the left-right stalemate. By looking at problems through the prism of reality, results, and solutions, it becomes clear that the narrow, one-dimensional, linear approaches of both the Democrats and Republicans are not sufficient to solve any problem in the real world. The mindset and method of innovative problem-solving addresses the micro issue by considering only the facts and evidence, carefully weighing each option objectively and subjecting the results to experiment and testing. It has worked in every other area of human experience, and politics is no exception. Innovation is such a powerful tool, so let’s look at a specific example of how it will improve our country.
Let’s build a better future through Innovation
To envision how powerful and effective political innovation can be, let’s look at an example of how the AIP and innovative problem solving can break the logjam of the status quo and deliver real results for the American people. There are many examples we could use, but the clearest illustration of how innovative problem solving can make a real impact is the issue of infrastructure. The single biggest impediment to achieving a solution to our infrastructure needs is plain and simple partisan division. Because the AIP would exclude partisan tribal considerations and the attending special interests that fund their disputes, we are far better positioned from the beginning to achieve results. Further, by focusing exclusively on how to most effectively, efficiently, and innovatively solve this problem, we increase our advantage in being able to achieve lasting solutions.
The first step of the method of innovative problem solving is to carefully examine the facts and evidence that apply to this issue. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the US will need to spend close to $4.5 trillion by 2025 to fix the country’s roads, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure. The average age of a dam in the US is 56 years old, and we have literally hundreds of water main breaks every day in cities all around our nation, wasting trillions of gallons of treated water every year. Also, according to a recent study, more than 50% of our primary and secondary schools require substantial repair, renovation, and upgrade. In examining the totality of the need, the old phrase, ‘pay me now or pay me (much more) later’ comes to mind. More importantly, beyond the cost and wasted dollars, the human toll of collapsing bridges, tunnels, and other infrastructure is a tragedy that in many cases, is avoidable.
The second step is to consider all the options objectively. The status quo approach is to engage in the same old wasteful procurement process, doling out contracts to well-connected firms that have hired the right lobbying firms full of ex-politicians, bundlers, and collectors of vast sums for Super-Pac’s. Under this deeply flawed approach, we just add a tax to the wealthy, which will not come close to covering the actual costs and tack on even more billions to our perpetually growing trillion-dollar-per-year deficit.
Alternatively, we can adopt an innovative approach that looks at this old problem in a new way. The first step is to streamline the regulatory approval process without compromising safety or the durability of any improvements. As the Bipartisan Policy Center points out, “The nation’s fragmented regulatory structure prevents new innovations from being developed and can prevent proven innovations that are being effectively implemented in a different jurisdiction from spreading. Specifically, overarching state and local regulations have been implemented to restrict specific contract structures, materials, and technologies from being analyzed and deployed, despite their potential benefits.” The US Conference of Mayors has also endorsed those sentiments, concluding in a recent report: “Closed procurement processes lead to unnecessary costs, and may diminish public confidence in a local government’s ability to provide cost-effective services.” This would require a significant effort free of partisan infighting to be successfully implemented but would yield tremendous short and long-term benefits.
Secondly, we need to lower the funding costs and increase access to new funding sources. One innovative mechanism that can be utilized to achieve this is the Public-Private Partnership (P3) model, which has worked well both in the US and around the world. As the name implies, it is a collaboration in which private entity finances, manages and constructs a project for a projected stream of revenue from the government directly or indirectly from the users of development.
In 2016, Syracuse University published a study of the utilization of this model in the US. After extensive research, they concluded that there was a “significantly higher likelihood” of meeting cost and timetable objectives in projects using the P3 model over traditional public project management. They also found that P3 addresses the key “structural and operational issues” that plague traditional public projects. As anyone affected by the Big Dig project in Boston will attest with its years of delays, 12.4 billion dollars in cost overruns, and the death of a motorist from a partial ceiling collapse.
In Europe, Australia, and the US, the design, construction and maintenance of large public sector projects have been dramatically improved by embracing P3 methods. In the US, the Courthouse in Long Beach California, the I-595 lanes in Broward County, Florida, and the I-495 lanes in Virginia are just a few specific examples of successful P3 projects.
Further, given the scope and breadth of the problem, we will need to appoint an Infrastructure Czar to help marshal the resources and shepherd through the changes that are required from top to bottom. As the funding needs are so large, we may need to also raise additional funds through a reconsideration of the gas tax. In the past, the needs of the country outweighed partisan concerns when it comes to the repair and maintenance of our world-class highway system. The gas tax was raised by both George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. However, the last raise was in 1993, and since then, inflation, greater fuel efficiency, and electric vehicles have put the Highway Trust Fund in serious jeopardy. The lack of a solution has led to accounting gimmicks, but the longer-term viability is still in question. We would also propose a carve-out for the most economically challenged commuters to not put additional strain on their finances.
After implementing these solutions, the AIP will still not rest. As in every situation, we will continuously evaluate the results of these new structures to provide a clearinghouse and communication channel for what is working and what is not working with the new policies. By looking at this old problem in new ways, having an intelligent, productive debate on how to solve the problem and executing with cutting-edge efficiency, the AIP will turn a quagmire into a shining example of what we can accomplish with a well-functioning political process. Ultimately, do we want future generations looking back and asking us, “what took you so long?”