Government at the Speed of Silicon Valley
J. Christian Gerdes, PhD
U.S. DOT Chief Innovation Officer
Can the federal government possibly keep pace with private-sector innovators? After all, our system of government is specifically designed to offer stability and provide checks and balances, not necessarily to move fast.
The key is for the government to adopt some of the best practices of the private sector to increase responsiveness and flexibility. Many of these directly parallel Silicon Valley's use of quick, successive prototyping to reduce the distance between imagination and reality.
In this talk, U.S. DOT Chief Innovation Officer Chris Gerdes discussed prototyping as a technique for rapid learning and described a number of ways in which U.S. DOT is harnessing this approach to improve safety and provide opportunity.
Examples include pilot deployments of connected vehicles, the safe integration of unmanned aircraft systems in the National Airspace System, the Smart City Challenge, and the recent development of a Federal Automated Vehicles Policy.
Gerdes’ talk is part of Volpe’s Future of Transportation series.
About the Speaker
Chris Gerdes is the first chief innovation officer at U.S. DOT.
In this role, he works with the Secretary of Transportation to foster the culture of innovation across U.S. DOT and find ways to support transportation innovation taking place both inside and outside of government. He serves as an internal champion for innovation and idea generation and as a departmental resource for problem-solving approaches, advanced research, automation, and connected vehicles.
Gerdes is serving at U.S. DOT while on leave from Stanford University, where he is a professor of mechanical engineering. His laboratory studies how cars move, how humans drive cars, and how to design future cars that work cooperatively with the driver or drive themselves. Vehicles in the lab include X1, an entirely student-built test vehicle; Shelley, an automated Audi TT-S that can lap a racetrack as quickly as an expert driver; and MARTY, an electrified DeLorean capable of controlled drifts.
Read more of Chris Gerdes’ biography.
News and Video
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