Should public policy students take technology courses? In a word – yes. Need more convincing? Our colleague at the Harvard Kennedy School David Eaves makes a compelling argument for the value of digitally-focused classes for students looking to join the public sector.

At the behest of then-CDO Lauren Lockwood, 2017 Social Enterprise Summer Fellow Kiernan Schmitt (MBA 2018) decided to join the City of Boston Department of Innovation and Technology for the summer. This blog post is a great reminder that government CAN have an innovative culture and can-do attitude.

Most people when they think of city government, they don’t exactly tend to think of pleasing and intuitive digital experiences. Former CDO (Chief Digital Officer) of the City of Boston and HBS alumna Lauren Lockwood is on a mission to change all that by creating interactions with government that don’t suck.

In an innovative data-sharing partnership, Waze’s Connected Citizen Program connects local governments with traffic incident and congestion data. Professor Mitchell Weiss’s case on the program offers a masterclass in management principles for how small partnerships with government can scale like they’re a Silicon Valley hotshot and successfully build cities fit for the future.

In this talk from our 2017 Digital Transformation Summit, Karim Lakhani the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School moderated a panel on how digitization and high resolution imagery is changing the worlds of commerce and government.

On November 2nd, 2016 the Digital Seminar series hosted Gillian Hadfield from the Gould School of Law at the University of California.

On May 4th, 2016 the Digital Seminar series hosted Robert Cannon from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He gave a talk called “Evolution of the Internet Interconnection Ecosystem.”