NASA's Public Participation Universe: Why and How the U.S. Space Agency Is Democratizing Its Approaches to Innovation

Abstract

This paper analyzes NASA's increasing effort to invite greater public participation in its technoscientific work through open innovation methodologies. First we examine why NASA has expanded its use of these approaches, noting the roles of an intertwined set of forcing functions including budget constraints, the growth of scientific data, availability of technological resources, political climate, and committed individuals. Next we outline the strategies the agency has invoked to engage the public in research, technology development, and other activities to advance and shape NASA's mission. As we show, promoting greater public involvement has entailed facilitating the NASA workforce's familiarity with open innovation approaches as well as developing projects and creating outreach strategies appropriate to the envisioned participant base. We then discuss the wide variety of outcomes NASA's open innovation initiatives have yielded in support of NASA research and development objectives as well as benefits to participants and others. We conclude with a discussion of the remaining barriers to the use of open innovation techniques as a standard practice and the strategies in work to overcome those barriers so the full potential of a democratized approach to innovation can be realized.

Logical Incrementalism as a Path to Strategic Agility: The Caseof NASA

“…Also during this time, 98% of the posted challenges resulted in cost savings for NASA, and approximately 90% of the challenges resulted in scheduled savings-increasing the speed, flexibility, and adaptability of NASA to new mission objectives. According to NASA leaders who implemented open innovation in the agency, 78 NASA has established a suite of initiatives, policies, funding streams, organizations, and communities aimed at facilitating the agency's use of "open innovation" approaches to engage members of the public in lending their skills, ideas, enthusiasm, and time to advance particular goals and objectives. NASA has welcomed a diverse set of individuals to collect and analyze scientific data, make discoveries, develop technologies and data applications, and solve complex problems.…”

Crowdsourcing: Citizens as coproducers of public services

“…From 2005 to 2015, Gustetic et al (2015) show that 50 NASA challenges produced various outcomes, including research advancement, NASA operational integration/use, external use for other agencies, education and public outreach, advancing state of the art and demonstrating proof of concept, enabling products to be brought to market, and creating new aerospace vendors and companies. Adopting complementary crowdsourcing allows NASA to coproduce with the public and to generate a broader range of solutions than would be possible with a contract with a single company (Kaminski et al, 2016).…”

“…Solicited ideas from the prize competition complemented the mission of NASA and resolved issues related to data applications, hardware prototype development, and concepts for research and technology advancement (Kaminski et al, 2016). As an example, the Mapping Dark Matter Challenge aimed to create a cosmological image analysis program to measure the small distortion in galaxy images caused by dark matter.…”

African Youth Engagement with Global Space Governance: The Case of Arizona State University's Interplanetary Initiative Space Governance Innovation Contest

“…Research has demonstrated that prize competitions can yield a wide range of cross-disciplinary potential solutions to global problems. 23 NASA, for instance, has hosted approximately 400 competitions that have enabled the global public to use wide-ranging expertise and problem-solving strategies to generate innovative solutions to space utilization problems. 24 The Space Innovation Governance Contest sought to address pertinent questions, namely (1) how can dominant narratives of space governance be positively influenced by opinions of aspiring and relatively new space actors and (2) how can we best design a platform or forum that supports continual engagement by participations particularly African youth, a nontraditional source of ideas and knowledge used for the generation of space law and policy.…”