A new report from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL), ‘Public sector, disrupted: How disruptive innovation can help government achieve more for less’, outlines disruptive innovation as a way to break the seemingly unavoidable trade-off between paying more and getting less.
“To get more for less requires doing things differently. From security to education, from health care to defence, we need innovations that break traditional trade-offs, particularly between price and performance,” said William Eggers, Research Director, DTTL Public Sector Industry. “Disruptive innovation offers a proven path to accomplish this goal, and transform public services in the process.”
The report represents the first major attempt to apply the groundbreaking concept of disruptive innovation across a number of diverse areas of the public sector. Areas the report examines include:
The criminal justice sector: Low-level offenders, who make up more than 60 per cent of the US prison and jail population, could be placed under house arrest with the supervision of an electronic monitoring device.
The average daily cost of incarcerat-ing a US prison inmate in 2008 was $78.95, while the potential average cost of daily electronic monitoring was $15, resulting in cost savings of 75 per cent.
The defence sector: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) cost a fraction of the price of manned aircrafts and satellites and provide several key perfor-mance capabilities: persistence, flight longevity, undetected penetration, the ability to conduct remote operations with fewer combat personnel, and the ability to operate in dangerous environments without putting pilots in harm’s way.
The education sector: Online learning – a blended learning environment of digital and traditional instruction – can potentially break the trade-off between standardised teaching and the more personalized instruction that a student might receive from a tutor. Additional cost savings would be incurred in the areas of faculty, resources, and infrastructure. Cost savings from blended learning have averaged 39 per cent, with some course costs reduced by as much as 75 per cent.