Improving Efficiencies More Effectively
Government exists to deliver better services and quality of life outcomes to residents. Yet, it struggles to do so amidst tight budgets and lean teams. Now more than ever, municipalities need to maximize internal resources to better steward public funds and constituent tax dollars. However, the very legacy processes and procedures built for accountability often create choke points that prevent innovative and effective service delivery.
Through its Public Innovation Challenge, MDIA works with government departments to identify barriers, streamline processes, and co-create systems that reduce duplication and delay. This involves: (1) streamlining processes to remove choke points, (2) identifying opportunities for economic efficiency, and (3) focusing innovation efforts on measurable outcomes.
Process Standardization, County-Wide
If departments are forced to “reinvent the wheel” for each innovation effort, including challenge based procurement experiments and pilot demonstrations, these attempts are doomed to fail. Standard processes avoid duplicating efforts and reduce confusion during execution
Adopting a clear, repeatable innovation framework ensures that the process of testing and implementing new solutions happens faster and more consistently. This, in turn, transforms pilot projects from one-offs into a scalable county standard.
How do we ensure that we can secure, implement, and move forward and not just make it a one-off, not just a pilot, and it dies?
~ Maurice Jenkins, Chief Innovation Officer, Miami International Airport
MDIA worked closely with the Strategic Procurement Department to standardize contracts and implement processes to go from open-call to pilot faster. MDIA co-designed a pilot demonstration process with the Strategic Procurement, Office of Innovation and Economic Development, Risk Management, and IT teams in just 90 days, a process that we continue to refine and iterate.
Efficiency and Savings
Private markets have a longstanding tradition of prioritizing innovation as a smart and high yield investment strategy. Yet the public sector often struggles to articulate the return of investment (ROI) of innovation efforts into tangible and immediate impact. MDIA helps quantify these opportunity costs. For local government, innovation ROI equates to operational and economic efficiencies. These typically appear in the form of maximizing budgets and new opportunities to generate revenue.
Efficiency extends beyond operational concerns, such as the time and resource allocations local governments make. It also encompasses the environmental and resident welfare considerations as well.
What we're trying to do is deliver better outcomes for residents, which I define as making it easier, faster, and less expensive to do business with the government and business within a government's jurisdiction
~ Francesca de Quesada Covey, Chief Innovation and Economic Development Officer, Miami-Dade County
Repurposing Sargassum to Reduce Disposal Costs of Organic Waste
Adoption of the challenge winning technology represents an opportunity for Miami-Dade County to reduce the roughly $35 million annual sargassum management costs, which include collection, transportation and landfill disposal.
Specifically, it could eliminate $4 million in annual collection costs by diverting sargassum from costly storage and converting them into leather alternatives, fertilizers, polymers and energy.
What’s more, these sustainable solutions stand to generate nearly $6 million in potential local economic impact.
Reducing Airport Navigation Time to Increase Revenue Opportunities
Geolocation and AR technology solutions piloted at Miami International Airport enhanced personal navigation routing for 4,000 passengers over a 90 day period.
This represents an opportunity to increase concession revenues by an estimated $175,000.