Policy. Innovation. These two concepts carry many misperceptions.

What do policy and innovation mean at LMI?

Policy implies gravitas. High level and strategic, policy sets the vision for the management and operations of an organization. Those who access and influence policymakers and implementers—are senior government officials, C-suite executives, and other strategic leaders. However, this definition limits policy’s relevance and reach to a narrow cohort with a need for involvement.

Changing policy is slow, measured, and difficult. Any revisions or modifications require deliberation, coordination, and time to implement and institutionalize.

Innovation carries the assumptions of being a history-changing discovery or a paradigm-shifting idea—something BIG. Associated with strategic thinking, innovation actualizes a grand vision. These assumptions about the scale and magnitude of innovation lead to the belief that only people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Kim Jones have the license to innovate while the rest of us merely consume the fruits of their genius.

Unfortunately, this lofty perception of innovation deters incubating and prototyping ideas instead of encouraging creative thinking. Under this assumption, innovation is never modest. The friction between policy’s gradual nature and innovation’s dramatic change seemingly puts these two concepts at odds.

While these ideas about policy and innovation have some truth to them, they’re just one facet of the design, intent, and potential of policy and innovation.

Policy and innovation are accessible, universal, inclusive, and incremental. Incremental steps build the bedrock to change and transformation for practices and processes. The world is full of policies. Policies guide how people operate—at work, school, or home. “No TV until you finish your homework” is a policy that guides how children spend their time at home after school. Classroom attendance policies establish the norms and parameters for behaving in a particular environment. These policies’ users, implementers, and audience are the public. Every day, people make, implement, and practice policies in their professional and personal lives.

With innovation, it’s not only the big ideas that improve how things are done. Small ideas matter as well: adjusting prototype designs through trial and error, learning from failure, turning weaknesses into development opportunities, and persisting to build the foundations for better solutions. Innovators create change through the incremental steps of designers, researchers, and engineers on a tactical level toward strategic objectives.

LMI empowers everyone to be policy innovators.

The LMI way of policy marries policy and innovation to drive improvements and change for government solutions. We use the friction between policy and innovation as the catalyst for new ideas and perspectives. Our policy strategists—analysts, consultants, and senior consultants—in the policy practice area offer years of policy experience in a myriad of topics, including health, defense and national security, intelligence, and the environment. LMI takes an engaged approach to solutioning policy challenges for the federal government.

We treat policy dynamically and cross-functionally. Policy specialists work alongside subject matter experts, data scientists, and developers to diagnose and address all aspects of the policy challenge and secondary and tertiary effects in our comprehensive solutions for our customers, such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Department of Veterans Affairs, and U.S. Postal Service.

LMI understands the importance of the policy-innovation partnership, encouraging and rewarding innovative thought and contributions from our employees. Through the Policy Community of Practice, employees share best practices in policy analysis, instill innovation in the workplace and at customer sites, sharpen their tradecraft, and incubate small ideas into realizable and actionable steps toward innovation. The policy practice area, along with LMI’s research and development experts, partner with academic institutions and research organizations to widen our network, deepen our expertise, accelerate the pace of change, and multiply our outcomes in policy.

LMI has proof points for delivering timely, perceptive solutions to our customers. In our upcoming blog series, policy practice area team members will share their perspectives on policy and innovation, the outlook for the policy challenges of government, and LMI’s solutions to these challenges.