Tag Archives: USA

Building Virtual Diplomacy

Building Virtual Diplomacy The Setup

Lets look at Innovation, Crowdsourcing, and the United States Government for a minute…

The world continues to move faster than ever and diplomatic responses from the United States are required that are both increasingly more complex and more urgent, and the required solutions must address the inherent situational challenges while also protecting the interests of the United States and its allies. To deal with this diplomatic reality, the United States State Department is embracing the principles of crowdsourcing, eGovernment, and open innovation and partnering with America’s best universities to help solve the World’s biggest challenges as part of a new initiative called Diplomacy Lab. I found the following after meandering through a bread crumb trail of tweets from @AlecJRoss (Hillary Clinton’s former Chief Innovation Officer):

Diplomacy Lab is designed to address two priorities: first, Secretary Kerry’s determination to engage the American people in the work of diplomacy. And second, the imperative to broaden the State Department’s research base in response to a proliferation of complex global challenges. The initiative enables the State Department to “course-source” research and innovation related to foreign policy by harnessing the efforts of students and faculty experts at universities across the country. Students participating in Diplomacy Lab explore real-world challenges identified by the Department and work under the guidance of faculty members who are authorities in their fields. This initiative allows students to contribute directly to the policymaking process while helping the State Department tap into an underutilized reservoir of intellectual capital. Teams that develop exceptional results and ideas are recognized for their work and may be invited to brief senior State Department officials on their findings.

This then led to me to information about another digital diplomacy program.

US State Department Harnesses Interns Around the Globe to Address Digital Needs

During Hillary Clinton’s tenure, the United States State Department introduced an eIntern program, as detailed on the State Department web site:

The Virtual Student Foreign Service (VSFS) is part of a growing effort by the State Department to harness technology and a commitment to global service among young people to facilitate new forms of diplomatic engagement. Working from college and university campuses in the United States and throughout the world, eInterns (American students working virtually) are partnered with our U.S. diplomatic posts overseas and State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and the U.S. Commercial Service domestic offices to conduct digital diplomacy that reflects the realities of our networked world. This introductory video provides an overview of the VSFS program.

VSFS eIntern duties and responsibilities will vary according to the location and needs of the VSFS projects identified at the sponsoring domestic or overseas diplomatic office. VSFS projects may be research based, contributing to reports on issues such as human rights, economics or the environment. They may also be more technology oriented, such as working on web pages, or helping produce electronic journals. Selected students are expected to work virtually on an average of 5-10 hours per week on VSFS eInternship projects. Students apply in the summer and if selected, begin the eInternship that fall lasting through spring. Most work and projects are internet-based and some have language requirements. Past projects asked students to:

Develop and implement a public relations campaign using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc. to communicate and reach out to youth

Conduct research on the economic situation, prepare graphic representations of economic data, and prepare informational material for the U.S. Embassy website

Create a system to gather and analyze media coverage on a set of topics including environment, health, and trade

Develop a series of professional instructional video clips to be published by the U.S. Embassy

Survey social media efforts of U.S. diplomatic posts, NGOs, and private companies around the world to help establish best practices in a U.S. Embassy’s social media outreach business plan.

The Conclusion

It is fascinating to see the world changing before our eyes and to see the children and young people of today engaged in commerce and government and entrepreneurship in ways that weren’t available to previous generations of young people. This only helps to accelerate the pace of change. But, the reality is that when an organization sits at the fork in the road and is making the decision of whether or not to actively engage people outside their four walls in their strategic efforts, the choice really is to either ride the crest of the wave by embracing and engaging talent outside your organization or choosing instead to get tumbled and drowned by this wave of progress by doing nothing.

What choice is your government or your organization making?

If you’re not sure how your government or your organization needs to change to adapt to these changing realities, check out my previous article:

What is the Role of Personal Branding in Achieving Innovation Success?

Build a common language of innovation on your team

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The New Reinvigoration of American Manufacturing

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The New Reinvigoration of American Manufacturing

As wages and shipping costs rise abroad, unemployment stays high at home, and strategic discontent with offshoring grows, U.S. Manufacturing finds itself facing its best chance at staging a comeback.

American companies are considering a reversal of offshoring and outsourcing to reduce risk, improve agility, shorten product development cycle, and improve their ability to simplify increasingly complex supply chain management.

Missing from this list is innovation, but US companies that commit to engaging American workers in their innovation efforts may also increase their ability to justify manufacturing their products at home.

As wages and shipping costs rise abroad, unemployment stays high at home, and strategic discontent with offshoring grows, U.S. Manufacturing finds itself facing its best chance at staging a comeback.

Moreover, Chinese workers are now three-to-five times more expensive than some other Asian workers, leading American firms to reconsider their sites of production.

One such firm is Nike, whose innovative Flyknit technology could allow it to make shoes easily anywhere in the world by having a machine make the most labor-intensive parts of the shoe. To bring production back to the United States allows Nike to react faster to competitors or to increase the speed of scheduled product launches. In the fashion industry, speed is crucial, and onshore production could create a competitive advantage.

Other firms are taking a second look at their reliance on contract manufacturers in China and elsewhere. Companies that once saw contract manufacturing as a strategic or economic necessity are questioning the wisdom of the arrangement as they watch original design manufacturers like HTC move up-market and strengthen their brands to compete with Apple, Motorola and others.

Adding fuel to the fire are rumors of workers at plants like Foxconn smuggling out plans and components to sell to pirates to make a little cash on the side.

But more importantly, an almost religious focus on cost and increased use of standard components across whole industries has made it more difficult for one brand to differentiate their products from another in the industry – increasing price competition and squeezing margins for all.

As a result, companies like Apple are now looking to reverse some elements of their standardization and outsourcing strategy and instead become more vertically integrated. Apple has acquired a chip design firm — and even their own chip fabrication plant (fab) — in its quest to differentiate itself and control some of its basic inputs and it may still acquire another fab to continue this strategic direction. Not to be outdone, Google is acquiring Motorola, and Nokia and Microsoft are working together closer than before.

It is possible for companies to manufacture their products in the United States and make a profit. When you invest in your workers, engage their hearts and minds and involve them in the innovation process, you can not only optimize your manufacturing processes but also uncover new growth opportunities that no contract manufacturer will ever bring to you.

Companies like New Balance, Snapper Mowers, American Apparel, Caterpillar, Syntax-Brillian (Olevia TV’s), Case IH, American Bicycle Group and many others have been working hard to keep making their products in the United States.

Now is the time for the Obama administration and state and local governments to step up their encouragement of US manufacturing. In these difficult economic times, Americans would love nothing more than to stroll down the aisles of their local Walmart, Target, or independent retailer and find more products on the shelves that say Made in the USA.

This article originally appeared on The Atlantic

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Narrowing the Widening American Skills Gap

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Narrowing the Widening American Skills Gap

Employers today are having trouble finding good workers and resent having to train them after the educational system is done with them. The skills gap – the difference between the skills needed on the job and those possessed by the applicants – is plaguing human resource managers and business owners looking to hire productive employees.

But will No Child Left Behind and a steep increase in federal education standards fix the problem or make it worse?

Most people would agree that our education system is no longer up to the task required for maintaining innovation leadership. The battle lines are drawn around exactly how to fix the problem. While China is focused on introducing more creativity into their educational curriculum, many in the United States feel that more Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education is the cure to what ails our innovation standing. The right path to take is not clear and so there are a lot of educational experiments taking place trying to find a better way forward.

But, we are approaching the skills gap in the wrong way. Employers need employees with more skills, not more education, and there is a subtle but important difference between skills and education.

Education comes through study. Skills come through practice.

We have a skills gap because our educational system is too focused on education and doesn’t focus enough on skills development. We need to focus more attention on teaching children that learning is an important and lifelong pursuit, and then teach them how to learn so they can easily acquire whatever skills they need through practice.

In an era in which almost any kind of knowledge work can be outsourced to India, the Philippines or elsewhere, we do our children a disservice if we prepare them for commodity work instead of the insight-driven, innovation-focused, highly-competitive workplace of the future. Our current education system is over-engineered around standardized tests and a single correct answer, and has very little tolerance for considering multiple “right” answers or why the right answer might be wrong.

We’ve re-architected our information technology infrastructure several times over the past few decades, yet our educational architecture remains unchanged. It is time to change the goals and expected outcomes for our entire educational system.

First, we must stop educating children and start educating families to close the gaps in basic academic skills, higher-order thinking skills, and personal qualities that face employers. Second, we need to spend less time memorizing data that can be easily accessed, and instead focus on extracting insights from available information and data.

According to Dr. Jacquelyn Robinson, a community workforce development specialist with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, “Creativity, once a trait avoided by employers, is now prized among employers who are trying to create the empowered, high-performance workforce needed for competitiveness in today’s marketplace.” We too must invest in instilling creativity in our children.

We need to spend more resources towards skill building. We need to transform teachers into tutors, proctors into facilitators, and shepherds into guides that assist students in discovering where their passions lie and help them engage in collaborative, project-based learning that builds the lateral thinking and problem solving skills that will drive today’s innovation economy.

At the same, we need to stop treating children as fungible commodities and instead re-architect our educational system to provide equal measures of general education, skills development, and passion discovery/practice.

So we need to learn more about passion identification and find ways to help children maximize their inherent gifts.

To close the skills gap, we need to stop thinking about how to make the current education system better and instead define what we now need our education system to achieve.

We need to experiment to identify new methods and structures to underpin an innovative education system in this country, and then find ways to scale the most promising solutions.

This article originally appeared on The Atlantic but it’s gone missing

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