The Budget continues to invest in efforts to open up Government-generated assets, including data and the results of federally funded research and development — such as intellectual property and scientific knowledge — to the public. Through these efforts, the Government can empower citizens and businesses to increase the return on investment with innovation, job creation and economic prosperity gained through their use of open Government data and research results. The use of this data and scientific knowledge has impacted the private sector, including fueling innovative start-up companies and creating American jobs, increasing the transparency of retirement plans, helping consumers uncover fraudulent charges on their credit card bills, assisting potential homebuyers in making informed housing decisions, and creating new life-changing technologies, such as leading-edge vaccines.
3.3.1
Opening Data to Spark Innovation
The Administration places a high priority on opening Government data as fuel for private sector innovation and public use. Since 2009, the Administration has released over 75,000 data sets to the public, while continuing to protect individual privacy, with over 67,000 of these data sets released in the last year alone. These data sets include everything from credit card complaints, to weather and climate measurements, to what different hospitals charge for different procedures. In demonstrating its commitment to open data, the Administration has developed performance metrics to measure agency progress in reaching open data goals, provided tools to make it easier for Federal agencies to publish data, and released guidance to agencies on how to engage with the community to identify priority data sets for release. The Administration continues to invest in and support efforts to unlock Federal data sets with a high potential for economic impact, including in the areas of health care, energy, education, employment, public safety, tourism, and agriculture. In addition, the Administration is committed to fueling the open data ecosystem by taking steps to connect agencies, entrepreneurs, and other innovators. The Budget provides $16 million for E-Government initiatives in GSA’s Federal Citizen Services Fund, supporting important IT investments including open data and digital Government initiatives. While emphasizing the opening of Federal data, safeguarding the privacy, confidentiality, and security of sensitive information is of the utmost importance, and agencies are required to do thorough reviews of their data prior to publication to ensure no sensitive information is released.
3.3.2
Accelerating and Institutionalizing Lab-to-Market Practices
As discussed in the chapter on Investing in America’s Future, the Budget invests $146 billion in research and development (R&D) across Government. The Federal Government’s investment in R&D yields extraordinary long-term economic impact through the creation of new knowledge, new jobs, and ultimately new industries. The Federal R&D enterprise must continue to support fundamental research that is motivated primarily by an interest in expanding the frontiers of human knowledge and diffusing this knowledge through open data and publications. At the same time, economic growth can be accelerated through more effective transition of R&D results from the laboratory to the marketplace, based on close collaboration with industry.
The Budget reflects the Administration’s commitment to accelerating the transfer of the results of federally funded research to the commercial marketplace by proposing increased funding for technology transfer from Federal labs in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) public-private Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program. In response to the President’s 2011 Memorandum on Accelerating Technology Transfer and Commercialization, the Budget proposes an additional $4 million for NIST efforts to accelerate and expand technology transfer across the Federal Government, which will enhance the competitiveness of U.S. industry by sharing innovations and knowledge from Federal laboratories. The Budget also proposes $30 million for the public-private I-Corps program at NSF aimed at bringing together the technological, entrepreneurial, and business know-how necessary to bring discoveries ripe for innovation out of the university lab.
Another example of federally funded R&D powering marketplace innovation can be seen in the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Lab-Corps program. This program empowers National Laboratory teams to identify market applications and private sector partners to commercialize high-impact new EERE technologies. The initial Lab-Corps pilot will be completed by the end of 2015, and in 2016, depending on the results of the pilot, DOE will expand the Lab-Corps program to other laboratory partners.
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