Breaking into Federal Innovation with Deloitte
Watch this webinar to learn more about Deloitte, GovConnect, and Deloitte’s Chief Innovation Officer, Nishita Henry’s advice for emerging tech companies looking to work in the federal space.
Meagan:
So welcome to our Dcode Virtual Series. My name’s Meagan Metzger. I am the CEO of Dcode. And for those of you that are returning and have maybe been a part of our other series, welcome back. If you’re new to Dcode, what you need to know about us is that we have one mission and that is how do we drive commercial innovation into the government market by connecting and educating government leaders and technology players in the industry to move forward together. So we do that a couple of ways. We have our technology accelerator, and that’s where tech companies in high growth, cutting edge technologies come to quickly learn how to rapidly have success and impact missions inside the government.
In our government organization, we train federal leaders on how to actually adopt different innovative practices, navigate procurement, and get innovative actually to bring more forward-leaning solutions in. And then for our partner communities, such as Deloitte, we work with organizations to help them understand how to quickly adopt emerging technologies into their practices so that they can bring solutions to their federal customers as well. I am really honored today and really excited for this conversation.
Please welcome Nishita Henry, who is the Chief Innovation Officer for Deloitte Consulting. Prior to that role, Nishita has a deep background in the federal government. So she was one of the technology leaders in the Deloitte Federal Practice and has just continued to constantly transform organizations both at Deloitte and a lot of the clients. So Nishita, welcome and thank you so much for joining us today.
Nishita:
Thanks, Meagan. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Meagan:
So we’ve got a lot of interesting things to talk about. For those that have been on one of these before, they know I always start out with kind of a funny question, which is, what is the funniest thing that you’ve either witnessed or had happen to you in a virtual environment on a video call?
Nishita:
Oh, well I think I told you that one, so I’ll repeat it. So I’ve set up my office down here in my basement so I could have a standing desk and have a little bit more flexibility. But the other side of my basement is a workout area and a dance studio and we have our Peloton there. And my husband likes to Peloton while I’m on calls frequently and while his music is playing through his headphones, he does breathe quite heavy, which can be very awkward when I’m on conference calls. So that’s the world we now live in.
Meagan:
Yeah, fantastic. That’s too funny. So one of the things we’ve been talking about consistently throughout this virtual series is the impact of this current environment, especially with the pandemic going on, and kind of its forcing hand in helping organizations really realize they need to innovate and transform and perform differently. So one of the things that I wanted to start with, I’m really excited to talk with you about, is I know now in your role across Deloitte Consulting, not only do you have that background in federal, but you’re now witnessing innovation and transformation in a lot of different sectors. And so I’d love to hear what impacts you’ve seen COVID have on other industries, and then I want to come back to what we can take away from some of that.
Nishita:
Yeah, great question. Well, as they say, necessity is the motherhood of invention. And so while this time has been incredibly trying on all of us from multiple aspects of life, it’s also accelerated change and accelerated it in a good way. Whether or not we’re talking about the future of work or the future of health or even some of our own businesses and how they adapt and create change that is going to be for the betterment of us all. And as you said, my role is both government and the commercial side and we see a lot of different things. What we’re seeing is that there’s been kind of a three-step process. There’s been a kind of response, how do I even deal with the change? How do I recover as we are learning to live in this new world? And then how do I thrive?
How do I actually accelerate and take the learnings from this and adapt to this new environment to create our new normal, as we all say? And different organizations have responded differently. Some of it, they had to go through a shutdown. And think about our retail industries and stores being closed, and those who had a bigger online presence survived better than didn’t. But they had to truly figure out how do they adapt their supply chain, how do they deal with their inventory, their workforce in a place where their physical environments were shut down. Others, instead of shutting down, had to really transform, whether those were in the government space, transit agencies or military bases. They still had to do their jobs, but they had to do it differently. And so how did they actually create ways for essential functions to continue and shut down non-essential ones while maintaining the safety of everybody involved? And then there were ones that were just overwhelmed.
You think about your hospitals, you think about supply chains that were transporting PPE from one place to the other. They were overwhelmed. They didn’t know where it was. They didn’t know how to get it from one place to the other, because really this change just highlighted the cracks in the system. And so the benefit of this is now we realize what wasn’t working, what hasn’t worked most efficiently, and we can find ways to better use data to tell where things are at any given point in time, to better use technologies like IoT and 5G to transmit that data faster and from the right places at the right time. So through all the overwhelmed organizations, they’ve been forced to use new technologies and new solutions in order just to keep up.
Meagan:
Sure. So the ones that have done well in that last stage where you’re kind of forced to make the adoption, I know technology is just a part of it, and that’s one thing that we witness here and help with every day at Dcode. You can meet a lot of shiny new tech that could impact your mission, but if you don’t have the culture change and things like that to go along with it, it will be a little bit harder. What do you see? What are some lessons that we could take away from the organizations that have done it well and maybe even some that have kind of tried to keep up and change and transform like you’re talking about, that didn’t come?
Nishita:
Yeah, so I think that in most instances, the folks that ended up being successful are the ones that had an agile mindset. “Hey, we’ve got to change. We have to change fast. We don’t have a lot of time to think about it and we need to try something.” Knowing we live in a world of uncertainty, knowing that nothing is perfect right out of the gate and figuring out how can I try something small and see if it’ll work. So those who are able to get out of the analysis paralysis mode and really go into, “Let’s do some experimentation,” probably are the ones that succeeded the fastest because they could run several experiments. Some didn’t work, some worked, and then they could accelerate the others.
The others that really benefited were ones that already kind of had a set of core digital technologies, frankly. Were you already in the cloud and you could already transition to a very virtualized workforce immediately? Were you in the cloud and already connected to all of your major data sets that enabled you to use that in a way to retarget your market? Were you already using technologies to reach out to your customers other than physical spaces? And so those that were already on the journey to digital transformation obviously have fared better. When you think about the world and we kind of call this a future fitness framework, we think about, “Hey, are you in the business of data, things or people?” And when you think about it that way, people in the business of data thrive, right? Because this is the time where that was needed the most. It’s what was used most. It is what wasn’t affected by COVID, because it’s data; it wasn’t human.
People that are moving things were more overwhelmed because they had to figure out, now instead of getting all of their supply to a restaurant, they had to get it to individual homes. So the overwhelm piece. And then the folks in the moving people really struggle, because people weren’t moving. And so how did they have to pivot their businesses? How did they have to go through and figure out what does shutdown look like? How are they going to help their own workforce transition in some cases? So there was just so much change in those three areas that those that were even further along in the digital journey on the people side could allow people to have experiences without physically moving.
Meagan:
Interesting. So I love the people side of that. And as I mentioned in the beginning, you have a deep background in the federal government in helping transform and lead digital transformation efforts there. What corollaries do you see? What are some of the biggest things that our market could adopt from the examples that you just gave?
Nishita:
Yeah, so I think the government and the future of work topic is huge. I think for a long time there has been a cultural resistance to changing how we work because either people didn’t believe that you could be effective without physically being in an office. They didn’t believe you could be collaborative and work in teams without physically being in an office or they weren’t sure they trusted their data outside of their physical offices. So there are all kinds of cultural barriers that technology has helped disprove, but it still requires you as people to believe it and to experience it. And so I think that this has forced us to do that because there was no other choice. We may not have moved towards this virtual work environment for another decade, if not for COVID and being forced to stay home. So Zoom calls, like we’re on now, who knew Zoom was going to be this big?
I mean, my kids do Zoom for their school classes now. I mean, it’s everywhere. It’s everything. My mother does her religious classes on Zoom, and so it’s something that we didn’t experiment with before. Things like, products like, collaborative software packages like Teams and Google Hangouts and all of those things that allow you to do things together without being physically together, I think is something we can absolutely learn from. And then on the data side, what data do you really need to be completely secure on and how can you do that in a virtual world and what data do you, like, nobody really cares if it, quote-unquote, “gets out” versus we just need it actually to do the function of our business. And I think it’s going to make us rethink how we do that in a government space as well.
Meagan:
Yeah. So you talked about the future of work and the innovation there and we talked about the people. So coming back to the tech, we’ve seen kind of obviously an increased concern around cybersecurity as one aspect of it, with our expanded footprint in the virtual world. We also see an uptick in DevOps and a drive towards that because we realize we need to be able to build things faster if we’re going to respond. What core technology areas do you think the government really needs to double down on, so that we, I think you said kind of overcome and then prepare for the future and become resilient?
Nishita:
Yep. The thrive piece. So I think there’s a several things. I think the automation piece is huge. I think the use of AI, robotics, automations that are helping organizations really function without human resources first and then moving those human resources from those types of manual jobs and work to actually ones where they’re doing the things we humans are best at, which is connecting with people, which is understanding needs, which is providing empathy and understanding and creating new processes and new policies and new functions to help others. So let’s get us using that higher brain function and getting some of the automation pieces done in a way that is safe, secure, and fast. So I think that that area, whether it’s in chatbots and call centers, or whether it’s with just actual moving data from one place to the other, so there’s that. I think the collaboration side will be huge.
And how do multiple levels of the government collaborate together? Whether it’s the regulators collaborating with their health providers and the insurance companies and the suppliers, and how does that network get created to share data better through things like blockchain, whether it’s to actually provide forums for people to come together to solve problems. I think that that’s another area where we will see increased collaboration between these entities because they’re not separate. One thing we all realize is the world is incredibly connected, and this has proved it even more. I think in other places, how governments can explore things like robotics and can explore remote monitoring of individuals to understand the spread of some of these pandemics and how do you actually know where the center of gravity in crisis is? How do you then prevent that from spreading to other places? And the use of technology and understanding that, from contact tracing to recovery, will be really important.
Meagan:
So I think I’d be curious to hear, I know when you first stepped into the role as Chief Innovation Officer, you know, you definitely went around the country and found these hubs and created really interesting models on how organizations, both corporations and government, can start thinking about technology. Tell us a little bit about what you stood up and what’s been the most effective.
Nishita:
Great. So yes, about 18 months ago we launched what we call Deloitte Catalyst. And Deloitte Catalyst is really intended to be in market with the startups and innovators so that we are on the ground level of understanding what emerging tech is appearing, how is that being applied to specific use cases, and how can we then take that to our clients and industries that best help solve their missions and challenges? And the whole premise is, look, we Deloitte are a great services company. We have in-depth and intimate knowledge of our clients and their missions and we’ve been working with them for 100-plus years; we have a great deal of solution knowledge as to how to create and take solutions to help our clients solve their problems. We’re not a products company. We don’t build tech from the ground up and that’s not our agenda.
Our agenda is to find the best technology and best solutions, add onto that IP that is unique to specific clients and industries that we have the knowledge of because we work with them so closely, and really take that product to the last mile right back into our clients. And so what we’ve done is we have created hubs around the world, Tel Aviv, Israel, Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, and several others where we are in market with VCs, with accelerators, with startups, and focused on specific domains. The domains could be industry-based like healthcare or they could be technology-based, like digital reality. And we’ve really been partnering with our startups to find a set of technologies and smart solutions that we can then create the last mile with and take to our clients. So that’s what we’ve really been working on. Again, we call it Deloitte Catalyst. It’s really exciting because it puts us at the forefront of that cutting-edge technology to bring to the market.
Meagan:
So you hit a little bit on the fact that you are a services company and that definitely plays a role in it, but why now? The emerging tech has been around for a while. We’ve been talking about innovation in the government market since I started in this industry over 15 years ago, but it’s different this time. So why such an intent interest in VCs and emerging tech to start these hubs?
Nishita:
So I think one of the differences, and this isn’t new, but the pace of tech change is exponential. And when even 10 years ago the curve was just starting to bend, but now the change, the newness, the advancement in technologies and solution is so fast and so rapid that you can’t really rely on all that occurring within your organization. Because no matter what and how smart you are and your team is and your organization is and how successful, there’s still more people who have more talent outside your organization than inside. And so it’s imperative for us to partner with those to tap into the best of the best talent, the best of the best technology, the best of the best solutions. And it’s not enough for it all to exist in one organization.
So it’s the access to that talent and technology, it’s the access to new and creative thinking, and it’s the access to being challenged, frankly. So organizations die when they start drinking their own Kool-Aid when they start thinking they’re the best and only they can do it. And by the way, it’s never been true, right? History has shown that organizations that have that kind of hubris don’t last that long. So it’s very important for all of us to realize how much there is to learn and how much we can learn by working with other organizations.
Meagan:
So maybe a little bit of a tougher question for you. So at Dcode, obviously we see a lot. We work across all the government innovation hubs and even those that aren’t necessarily designated innovation hubs, and we provide training and help them morph the way they’re thinking. We work with folks, I know we work closely with Deloitte on finding and vetting and really bringing in tech that can thrive in the government market, but there’s still change. It’s a mindset shift. So our acquisition system still incentivizes services, and butts in seats. How do organizations, including the government, make that decision between, do I partner with an emerging tech? Do I bring an emerging tech to my client? Do I build it? Do I buy it?
Nishita:
It’s a tough trade-off. And unfortunately, our systems, government and non-government, have just been built up over decades and decades and decades of the same thinking. And the thinking has more been around compliance, it’s been around control, and it’s been around making sure that you can check off of a list so that you can make sure you get, quote-unquote, “got what you paid for”. And that mentality restricts innovation because innovation, there’s no real checklist, and innovation is very hard to say, “I’m going to comply with these four things and I’m innovative.” Innovation requires experimentation; it requires you to fail, it requires you to do a lot of different things before you find the right answer. And so yeah, is that at odds with our government acquisition system? Absolutely. The hopeful part is, I believe our acquisitions professionals and systems are realizing, they’ve got to figure out a way to actually be on the forefront of that innovation and get new things in because they’re realizing what’s been happening is we’ve been spending a lot of money and not solving our problems.
And so what they’ve done with the other transaction authorities and those OTAs and putting in ways that we can actually work with new types of organizations has been great. And I think what’s even better about it is we’ve been partnering new organizations with those of us working in the government a long time so we can get the best of both worlds. And I think that’s been really good. I think fundamentally, we as a country have to change our mindset around what we expect of our government and how we expect our taxes to be spent. Because if you work all the way back to you putting in taxes and congress appropriating it and then giving it out to agencies, because of the scale of that entire effort, everyone wants to make sure we’re not wasting. Everybody wants to be on the forefront of, “Oh, the DOD tried this brand new system of collaboration, of working with other organizations and it didn’t work and they spent a billion dollars.”
Those are headlines on the front page that nobody wants. We need to flip the switch on that and say, “Look, we tried this program. Here are the 10 things we learned from it and that we got from it, and yeah, it cost us money to get there, but if we didn’t do it, we would never, ever have been able to share X, Y, and Z or accomplish these three objectives.” And so I think that our leaders have to embrace failure and take that failure and change it into learning. And that’s the only way we change kind of the hearts and minds of how we do this and then the processes will follow. But until we do that, it’s a very hard thing to do.
Meagan:
Yeah, I could not agree more. We actually just ran a course a couple of weeks ago around innovative procurement and one of the biggest things that we’ve found is, and that we’ve seen over the last four years of Dcode, is these scope and these requirements, and we’re still so entrenched in that. They’re so prescriptive that most emerging technologies and capabilities can’t even bid on it. You’re leading digital transformation efforts. When you see those scopes come out, what’s the greenfield and the way to do that from the government side? Is it more statements of objectives and here’s what I want to get to? What’s the ideal way that a government engages to be more forward-leaning?
Nishita:
Yeah, I think that a broad vision of what you want at the end without prescribing how to get there is important. And say, okay, if we intend on eliminating these 14 processes and replacing them with one, great, that’s what we want to do. Now let’s figure out how we actually go about doing it from the ground up as opposed to prescribing exactly. This process can only have eight steps and this process can only have nine and this. So we have to be more available to do that. We also have to be more available to actually have some experiments done and say, let’s do a phase one, and let’s figure out what we’re going to learn from it, and then let’s go do the next thing and then let’s go to the next thing. So more of that agile mindset as opposed to, tell me what the entire interior project is going to be, tell me how much the whole thing is going to cost, and go do it. Right? Because nobody really knows. Things change. Nothing ever goes as planned.
And so how do you adapt and change in a contract that has stuck you into a two-year fixed price, fixed outcome? It’s very hard to do. So we’ve got to change the mindset of how we do some of those as well. And we’ve got to be able to have those checks and balances in place to hold folks accountable when it isn’t just a failure of the innovation, but it’s truly negligence or lack of skill. And so we’ve got to be able to differentiate between those two, and we’ve got to be able to put in the checkpoints and the governance to be able to do that, which requires a lot more thinking on everybody’s part as opposed to following a checklist.
Meagan:
Very, very well said. And a similar question, how in a world where we have a crisis such as COVID or maybe it’s some other crisis in the future, and all that energy pivots to responding to that, what is the role of industry like at Deloitte in making sure the government still innovates in other pockets when we’re putting a lot of energy here? Does that make sense?
Nishita:
Yeah. I think that energy and the response is one thing. I think that innovation is happening in that response, right? Because we’ve had to come up with new solutions. Governments never knew they were going to have to provide a hub where their citizens could report if they’ve had contact with somebody with the virus, or how do you actually then trace that from person one to person two to person three? So the whole concept of contact tracing wasn’t a thing.
We had to pivot very quickly, and Deloitte’s been working a lot with our state government agencies to put in things what we’re calling GovConnect, which enables the government to connect with our constituents and make sure they know and understand where those in need are so that they can provide them with the services at the right time and right place. So the way we’ve sped up that collaboration in a digital way is important. You think about the old government offices: I’m in an office, you come to my location, you stand in line, you fill out a form, but that doesn’t work anymore. So the whole transition to those digital services has been huge and we’ve been innovating there. As far as how do you figure out how not to lose momentum on the other areas that may not be responding? I think the question there is, all right, what are you as an organization going to need to thrive in the new world and what does that look like?
Because even though some of those missions may have been slowed down during crisis response, they’re going to be needed when we go back to some form of normal. And how do you deal with the backlogs there? So for instance, like vehicle registration, for lack of a better example. We may not have been doing them because nobody was going anywhere for a while and we shut it down, people are going to go places soon and we’re going to need to do that again. And how do you actually work through that backlog? And so we’ve got to focus on where in those areas that were shut down during this timeframe are going to need to come back and not only just come back at the same level they were at, but they’re going to have to work through a large backlog and they’re going to have to do things differently so that they’re not five years behind in, quote-unquote, “processing” or getting their work done.
Meagan:
And actually, that’s a great lead-in for a question that just came in from the audience, which is, what aspects of government are most ripe for innovation? And what area do you personally find to be the most exciting?
Nishita:
That’s a great question. What is the most ripe for innovation? I think that some of the main places in government are around some of the agencies that provide direct services to our citizens. I think that the way we provide those services is it’s probably more antiquated than it needs to be. It doesn’t necessarily always reach the full audience we want it to reach. And in that way, I say we can do better targeting. With better data, we can know more specifically where those services need to be targeted so that they’re used by the people who need them most.
So I think that data is very important and the way we innovate on the usage of that data for government is important. I think the delivery of those services then is also important. We may have had to rely on person-to-person interaction. In a day and age like this, we can’t do that anymore. So how do you deliver those services in a virtual way? How do you help those who don’t maybe have access to the virtual environments to have access and how do you create opportunities for people that might not have the same access as others? So I think those are areas I think the government should focus on as they’re one of their main functions. And then I think on the back office side, I think about all of the ways and the processes that the governments have to function that are still manual or still in legacy systems.
And by legacy systems, I mean whether they’re in mainframes where the processing or the interaction with those and the changes to those are very difficult or they’re in 20, 30-year-old regular Visual Basic systems, maybe a step up from the mainframe, and how do they actually transition to the cloud in a way that doesn’t just lift and shift the things they have today, but actually recreate them in an environment that allows them to be way more flexible and way more agile. And that excites me because that requires not just a movement from one to two. It’s like how do I get from one to 10, and how do I do that in a way that reimagines the way I do work? So I think that is what is the most exciting.
Meagan:
Yeah, absolutely. And on that note, audience, if you do have questions, feel free to put them in the chat window and we will tee those up. So we do open it up for audience questions. We’re going to keep the conversation going. But yeah, Nishita, I completely agree with you. It’s been interesting. We’ve had several companies that have worked on some interesting projects around, I’ll use predictive maintenance as a really fantastic example. And we’ve also worked with the government leaders in kind of shifting their mindset. It’s like we want to do artificial intelligence, but we need to also just first address the fact that a pilot fills in a manual maintenance log and walks it a mile across the airfield. And those types of functions are so right for disruption and there’s a lot of incredible opportunity there. So the counter of that, you talked about what you’re most excited about from the use cases inside government, you’re involved with a lot of tech companies and venture. What markets do you see evolving in the private sector that you’re most excited about, that you think might be able to have application back in?
Nishita:
Yeah, so I’ll give a couple of examples that I think I hope a lot of people can relate to. I think about the sports environment and I think about the fact that we all took in sports as a real live fan experience, whether there are people in stadiums and at sporting events, which might not happen for a very long time, and think about what it’s going to take for those leagues to engage audiences. TV and all of that obviously still exist, but you’re not always making the revenue when people are sitting at home versus at a stadium and buying things. And so how do you continue to engage your fans? How do you continue to engage the entirety of the market in a way that enables you to continue your goals in terms of revenue and in terms of repeat buying?
So those types of things would be really interesting on how we do that in a virtual world. And I think that that has absolute applicability to serving our constituents from a virtual perspective. So I think there are some things we can learn about, like I’ve mentioned, using data to target folks, and making sure we know which services are for the right market and where that demand is. I think the other one that’s a big one being disrupted is supply chain, flat-out, and manufacturing. Because that has shown so many kinks in terms of not knowing where things are, getting things to the right place at the right time, making sure that what needs to be manufactured, and predicting surges.
So that predicted, you know, you mentioned predictive manufacturing, the prediction of these things so that we can meet demand faster is going to be really important. I mean, take our own toilet paper shortages. Who knew that was going to be a thing, but maybe it could be predicted. Human behavior’s fascinating and always changing, so now we know, but how can organizations become more predictive is going to be the key, because nobody predicted this to be the way it was, right? And how do we leave ourselves open to all the possibilities and unused data in a way that helps us do that?
Meagan:
Yeah, I think, the supply chain, I think COVID has really exposed opportunity for innovation in the supply chain, not just from prediction. But any thoughts on how you also, we’ve realized, it needs to be secure and how do we protect our supply chains as well? Have you seen anything interesting on the private sector side around that?
Nishita:
Yeah, we’ve been talking a lot about secure supply chain and knowing and understanding who all the suppliers in your ecosystem are and what impacts could be had on them. So in this day and age where your supply chain proliferates, and you could have small companies that are your sole provider for one part of your product and not realizing, hey, that company, the minute that geography goes down, you’ve lost that entire piece of your supply chain. And understanding from a security perspective, what’s the resilience of your supply chain? Do you need two or three of those providers versus one? And how do you make sure you have backups?
And so understanding that entirety of your supply chain from where you are all the way back has been something people have been incredibly vigilant on now, and knowing who they are and what their impacts would be economically, geographically, et cetera. So there’s that piece of it. And then the other piece in the supply chain is knowing where anything is upstream of your supply chain and using better technology.
We talked about at the beginning of this call sensors and information and data that is across the entire supply chain. So you know where something is at any given moment in time, and can you then redirect that at any given moment in time because things change? So how do you actually create that movement will be really interesting.
Meagan:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so we have another question coming in from the audience and one that I’m near and dear to with our tech scouting team, but it is, do you see resistance from the venture community and investing in startups that are interested in innovating the government? So how do you help overcome that?
Nishita:
Yeah, it’s a great question. Do I see resistance? I think I see trepidation. I don’t know that people are like, “No, I never want to do that.” I think people are like, “Well, I don’t know how, and am I going to get a return, frankly?” We live in a capitalist society and people have to know the money I’m putting in is going to be valuable for me later down the line. And so how do we actively partner with startups to help them create a market, not just in the government space, but in the commercial space too, which only benefits government. So I think it’s actively working to make sure that we are creating tech that will be more widely used from a return perspective. I also think it is finding ones that have been successful already, and this is, Meagan, what you do in the commercial space and how do you bring them into the government space?
Because they either have a personal passion, they see an extension of their marketplace, or they see the government being a channel to an even bigger market. So I think that that is, that’s really important when we’re talking about attracting them. And I think what’s really important is attracting them to the mission you’re trying to solve, right? At the end, we’re all humans and we all want to know we are contributing to some form of greater good. And so connecting it back to the mission to say, “Look, by working with the government, you are helping to make sure that families who have food insecurity have less food insecurity and are getting to be able to feed their families on a regular basis,” or, “By helping us, you are protecting our country from X, Y, and Z.” So I think it’s really important for governments to be able to articulate that vision to startups really well because I think people can get behind that more than anything.
Meagan:
I couldn’t agree more. And just to add to it, I mean we’ve seen, so we accelerate, as you mentioned, those dual-use technologies or technologies that were built for commercial, the idea being they have to innovate to stay alive and thrive in the commercial world, let’s bring that innovation in. And a lot of times we end up having to brief the board and a lot of it is just a lack of understanding because there’s not a lot of transparency in the process of how the government market works and saying, “Let’s just set expectations.” And once you understand that, you know, you get companies from the Andreessen Horowitz and the Sequoias of the world that are coming in and innovating. How does Catalyst, that was the second part of the question, is how does Catalyst help with this as well? Or second, because I know we have a lot of technology companies on the phone as well, how does a tech company engage with Catalyst?
Nishita:
So we work hand in hand with Dcode specifically in the government space to identify sets of companies that we want to take to market and we want to create new solutions with. And so what we’re helping to do is, one, through using our vast network and contacts and channels within the government space, we are known for helping to innovate and helping to do new things for the government in a way that helps them do things for less cost or increased efficiency. And so, one of the things we do is in a lot of our big accounts. We’ve actually set up innovation funds that enable us to reinvest what we are doing in their traditional spaces into innovating for new ways of doing things that we’re either doing or that we see that government organization needing more or less of. So there’s a piece of that.
There’s a piece of the fact that we’ve been very focused on AI, on cloud, on supply chain, on healthcare as major areas for us, and we’ve been actively identifying sets of startups and partners in that space that we are taking to the government market to solve those missions. There’s one we’re solving and we’re working on right now with military organizations around virtualized healthcare and how do we bring a set of partners together that enable us to have secure channels for virtual health experiences, as well as connectivity back to the medical platforms that allow doctors to use and share that data to service their patients more effectively. And so we’ve partnered with a lot of folks there in order to do that as well. As I said, I think it’s convincing and understanding what the mission is and getting behind that because the government’s mission to provide healthcare is no different from the private sector’s mission to provide healthcare. And so doing that for our soldiers obviously has even more meaning. And so I think that’s an important way that Catalyst is helping to bring startups to market.
Meagan:
Sure. So maybe one of our final questions here is what advice, after this conversation kind of we’ll do a nice summary, with what advice can you give practitioners, both in the government or maybe in organizations and tech companies, that want to take their ideas and build prototypes? We talked about a lot of ways you can do that. What is the biggest takeaway you want people to have from this conversation if they want to get started?
Nishita:
So one, don’t wait for someone to ask is the number one thing I’d tell you. I would say, document your idea, put it down, flush it out, and figure out, one, what problem are you solving? How are you solving that problem better than anybody else? And what’s it going to take for you to actually execute and take that solution and make it a reality? Three simple things. Get it down, talk to your team leads, talk to people and keep talking. Even if the first person says, “Eh, I don’t have time for that,” right? Go on to the next person. Keep working your way until you find somebody to listen and keep testing your idea, right? Because other people are going to hear and be like, “Eh, have you thought of this angle? Have you thought of that angle?” And keep refining it, right? So as any practitioner looking for that, start local, start with your own teams and move it up into the organization.
So I 100% believe that. Some organizations run formal innovation programs like the Shark Tanks of the world or startup environments, et cetera. Get involved in those. But if your organizations don’t have things like that, talk about creating ways for you to do that, right? Talk about, “Hey, how do I start up an innovation form?” Do it on a night, do it on a weekend, do it outside, right? I find that, listen, innovation doesn’t happen from eight to five. It happens all day, anytime. And if you’ve got a passion, you know, nothing should stop you from being able to pursue it.
Meagan:
Perfect. I can’t think of a better way to end. Nishita, really appreciate you joining us today. That was fantastic. Great insights.