How Can NASA Encourage NASA Employees to Innovate?

April 26, 2009 6:30 AM

How Might the Personal Pet Projects of NASA Employees Provide Fuel For Innovation at NASA?

The employees of Genentech, 3M and Google, along with other private sector companies, are encouraged to use up to 20% of their regular work week on personal pet projects to create innovative products.

As a result of a recent recommendation, the NASA Senior leadership directed its Agency Office of Human Capital Management and Center Human Capital community to begin researching similar models for NASA employees...unclear if this includes the Agency's contracted employees, too.

How might NASA achieve a goal that enables its employees to devote 20% their time toward innovative pet projects with taxpayer-funding throughout its workforce of educators, procurement and contracts, operations, legal, human resources, information technology, legal, financial, scientists and engineers?

Is this the right question?

posted by choragus to law & government (10 comments total)

It's similar to a sketchbook for a graphic designer. Most of the sketches never ever see the light of day, but the process helps foster better design and creativity. In science, it can be just as important to work off the beaten path a bit. You can work towards a goal all day and get t done, but many of the most important discoveries happen by accident, something these pet projects are most likely to enable. The sound of discovery usually isn't "Eureka!". It's more like, "Hey, what's happening here, this is odd..."
posted by azpenguin at 8:13 AM on April 26

Is this a question about how this process would work, or how it would be funded? (public vs. private money)
posted by puckish at 8:27 AM on April 26

If you're Researching a Model with Measurement of Return on Investment, you're doing it wrong. The whole point of the "20% time" concept is to give space for people to do things outside of tightly measured, controlled management.

When I worked at Google "20% time" for engineers was basically cover for "I'm working on this cool thing today, please leave me alone". For many people they never used 20% time, some people were doing 20% projects half the time some months. It was up to the employee him/herself and their boss to make sure it was used productively. There's no particular way to measure the effectiveness of this 20% investment across the company. You can point at specific projects that grew out of it. But the value of it is mostly tacitly understood that if you give smart people some space, they'll do good things with it.
posted by Nelson at 8:28 AM on April 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

It seems unlikely that such a thing would be easy to implement at NASA, run as it is on a contract model—contracts that are already under incredible pressure to bring their projects in on time and on budget. I wonder if it can be done at a government institution at all, or if such attempts will simply be read as lazing around on the taxpayer's dollar? Isn't the public perception of NASA already that it's a rather bloated behemoth, and past its prime?

[not NASAist; my dad's been working under contract for them off and on since before I was born.]
posted by felix grundy at 8:48 AM on April 26

I work at a company that is well-known for encouraging this kind of personal innovation. While it may have been real in the past, it's a bit of a joke around the office today, and not just because the economy is tanking. Even before the recession, the company had been downsizing and streamlining to maximize growth. So, there's this atmosphere that if you have time to spend on side projects, you aren't working hard enough on your real projects. Then, you add the economic tension on top of that, and everyone is working really hard to prove that they are team players, and getting their work done, etc. and the innovation goes out the window. None of this comes from anything stated by CEO or other management, but just from the reality of trying to keep a job in the troubled economy.

So yea, I sort of agree with felix grundy, just from the perspective that right now it seems to be perceived as a luxury. That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile, it just means it would be a fight to get it in place.
posted by cabingirl at 9:35 AM on April 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

@puckish good question. I am going with "extra time" outside of ROI considerations.
posted by choragus at 9:48 AM on April 26

@felix grundy yes, Although there is the contractor workforce to consider. there are still almost 20k NASA civil servants. The use of "extra time" for innovation efforts by each of these people could provide the equivalent of 400 additional employees.
posted by choragus at 10:14 AM on April 26

mmm...I should never do math in front of a group or mefi. That should be 4000 additional employees.
posted by choragus at 11:11 AM on April 26

Although there is the contractor workforce to consider. there are still almost 20k NASA civil servants. The use of "extra time" for innovation efforts by each of these people could provide the equivalent of 400 additional employees.

From my perspective (assuming zero ROI, which obviously isn't true), it actually reduces the workforce by the equivalent of 4,000 employees -- otherwise every company in the world would be going after the free 20% increase in productivity.

That is, the agency is paying each employee for eight hours a day, but is only getting 6.4 hours worth of work that's directly and immediately relevant to the agency's mission.
posted by Doofus Magoo at 3:43 PM on April 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

The coordination costs and administrative overhead could be out of line with expected value. It might be useful to look at this as a waste-cutting measure. NASA might have to trim back the coordination costs and administrative overhead by X so that they can achieve 20% efficiency and allow employees time to work on their personal pet projects.

Would this be similar to applying the Pareto Principle?
posted by choragus at 5:58 PM on April 27