Gov Innovator Podcast

Administrative data – in other words, big data produced by public agencies and programs – is a valuable tool for program evaluation, research and analysis that can help improve government performance and tackle our nation’s pressing challenges. How can we enable more qualified researchers and government program managers to security and more easily access those […]

What insights can public leaders gain from leading companies about building a culture of experimentation? To find out, we’re joined by Stefan Thomke, the author of the new book Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments. Dr. Thomke is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and has published […]

Attracting a police force from diverse backgrounds is one important step in ensuring that citizens are well served by their police departments and have trust in the police. But what steps can police departments take that are effective in achieving that goal? The Behavioral Insights Team, in conjunction with the What Works Cities Initiative, set […]

The Small Business Administration's Jason Bossie describes how the SBA strengthened a culture of evidence and data, including creating an evaluation office and a chief data officer role within the CFO's office, as well as creating a learning agenda to identify priority research questions from its bureaus.

Lisa Massena explains how OregonSaves is designed to make payroll retirement savings plans available to all workers in Oregon, with design features that make it easier for participants to make good choices.

Lindsay Page of the University of Pittsburg and Michael Weiss of MDRC discuss the Dell Scholars Program and CUNY ASAP, both of which have been found to have sizable effects on promoting college success for low-income and first-generation students.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently launched a pilot version of a new initiative called the Data Science CoLab, an eight-week-long data science training program. The first class, which kicked off in October 2017, included 25 employees from different agencies within HHS and with different levels of knowledge about using data. Participants applied […]

The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, passed by Congress and signed by the President on February 9th, 2018, contains several noteworthy bright spots in the use of data and evidence-based policy. Those wins suggest there is continuing bipartisan support in Washington for using evidence, data and innovation to improve the results and cost-effectiveness of Federal […]

A small but growing number of federal departments and agencies have created  evaluation policies that describe the principles that those agencies seek to promote when they conduct program evaluations. Those principles can include rigor, relevance, transparency, independence, and ethics. To learn more about evaluation policies and why they are useful to federal agencies, we are […]

Matthew Notowidigdo of Northwestern University discusses how South Carolina is using random assignment within its Medicaid program into order to build evidence about the program and better serve clients.

Amy Laitinen and Clare McCann of New American discuss the new report, "Putting the Experiment Back in the Experimental Sites Initiative." They discuss how this U.S. Department of Education's "Ex Sites" initiative can become a more effective learning tool to improve higher education policy.

Laura Wentworth, the director of the partnership between Stanford University and the San Francisco Unified School District, shares insights from the partnership.

While Democrats and Republicans can’t seem to agree on much these days, there was a bright spot for bipartisanship recently: Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray joined together to praise the recommendations of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP), which Ryan and Murray launched last year. The Commission was […]

Greg Duncan of UC Irvine discusses features of interventions that can be expected to sustain beneficial program impacts for children and adolescents.

Emily Gustafsson-Wright of the Brookings Institution discusses global trends in impact bonds, used to harness private capital to fund social interventions.