While the ink is barely dry on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, it’s worth noting that the rules for spending much of the $1.9 trillion from the American Rescue Plan that was signed back in March are not yet final. Public comment on the Treasury Department’s guidance for ARP’s $350 billion in state and local fiscal recovery funds were due over the summer and are getting their last review now. One additional word in Treasury’s final rules could shape whether the rescue plan lives up to its transformational billing, and ultimately whether the new infrastructure and other economic investments do too. The word to add? “Abandoned.” Read More.

BBJ Executive Editor Doug Banks was among the speakers, and he interviewed Mitchell Weiss, Harvard Business School professor and author of "We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve our Most Urgent Problems." Read more.

During a recent GovLoop training, author and Harvard Business School professor Mitchell Weiss discussed the ideas behind his new book We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve our Most Urgent Problems. In his book, Weiss rejects the idea that government and innovation exist on opposite poles, pondering how government can try new things....Read More.

The day after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, city leaders there acted fast to set up a new nonprofit to take in donations from all over the world and redirect the funds quickly to survivors and their families. Mitchell Weiss was chief of staff to then-Mayor Tom Menino at the time, and played a big role in the experiment.... Read More.

So far, 2021 is turning out just as we expected: A little turbulent, a lot more focused, and of course, still fraught with anxiety leavened by hope. Much of this relates to our government’s ability to manage the end of the paralyzing pandemic while also rebuilding an economy that has left far too many people scrambling. We have talented and committed people in government and we need them to be successful on our behalf. So I’m hoping that policymakers and business leaders will take the time to check out a few new good books. After all, as Harry Truman noted: “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers."...Read More.

Many despair of government’s ability to tackle difficult issues after a year of pandemic, economic collapse, and civil unrest — and that’s in addition to such chronic problems as education, health care, and the environment. But there may be grounds for optimism, believes Mitchell Weiss, professor of management practice and the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School. In a new book, “We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems,” Weiss argues that by embracing an entrepreneurial spirit, public agencies can bring creative solutions to even seemingly intractable challenges. The Gazette recently spoke to Weiss, a former chief of staff to the late Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, about the potential for innovation in government and how to foster it. Read More.

The assumption that Government and public agencies lack the capacity for innovation and do not have an entrepreneurial-like ability to find novel solutions to major problems is a myth that needs challenging. However, a shift is required from “probability government”, overly focused on performance management and mimicking best practice, to “possibility government”, embracing greater imagination and risk... Read More.

This is an excerpt from We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems by Mitchell Weiss. In it, Weiss, former chief of staff to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, talks about human-centered design, its promise and its limitations. Often, proponents of human-centered design think about making change by streamlining a process or building an easier-to-use form or app. But as Weiss shows, sometimes human-centered designers need to think even more broadly. Read More.

Harvard Business School faculty members share their expectations for a Biden presidency and offer advice to the commander in chief as he takes on the raging COVID-19 pandemic and a divided nation. Read More.

Public entrepreneurship can bring agile thinking and new ideas to governments. Mitchell Weiss explains how in his new book, We the Possibility. As we work on challenging public problems, embracing the entrepreneurial spirit can help in developing solutions... Read More.

As COVID-19 exposed vulnerabilities in state and local government IT systems, the newly formed U.S. Digital Response stepped in to help. Its successes offer insight into existing barriers and the future of the civic tech movement. Read more.

As COVID-19 was sweeping the globe in January 2020, public health officials in Singapore implemented a tried and tested tool to help contain infectious disease: human-led contact tracing, the process of tracking down and notifying individuals who have been exposed to the illness. Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH) used contact tracing as an adjunct to screening, free testing and treatment, and strict quarantine measures, drawing on the city-state’s previous experience with pandemics, including SARS, H1N1, MERS, and Zika. Then in March 2020, Singapore deployed the world’s first Bluetooth-based contact-tracing system, TraceTogether, a new digital tool to assist human contact tracers in the fight against COVID-19... Read more.