Public Tech Innovation with Real-world Implementation

Project Overview

Idoia Ortiz De Artinano Goni arrived at Sloan ready to mine her years of experience at the Inter-American Development Bank and to explore new domains. Her questions: what works—and what is falling short—when it comes to technological innovation that serves the public? Why don't more startups serve public needs?

You come to Sloan and suddenly you have an entire ecosystem…. The challenge here is to understand the ecosystem and [find] your tribe of people that are interested in the same things that you're interested in.

—Idoia Ortiz De Artinano Goni, SFMBA '18

Idoia began by exploring the burgeoning field of public tech, defining a set of linked studies that examined various participants—governments, investors, entrepreneurs, and consultants. The existing literature helped to frame the constraints and opportunities facing public-focused entrepreneurship.

To connect what she was learning to real-world implementation, she defined an action-research collaboration with two recent Sloan Fellows alumni in Peru looking to create an open blockchain challenge to more effectively assign communal water rights. A better technology could enable indigenous communities to manage their water resources with more transparency and responsiveness and improve lives for families while better serving farmers and industry.

Along the way, Idoia helped create a series of discussion sessions about public-focused entrepreneurship and the future of tech for cities. The standing-room-only sessions attracted participants from across the MIT campus—from Urban Studies, Engineering, and the Media Lab along with Sloan—and other universities including Harvard, Babson, and even Lisbon, setting the stage for what we hope will be many more conversations to come.