The Presidential Innovation Fellows program is put on annually by the General Services Administration, to bring experienced talent into government, and provide a new outlook on issues affecting agencies. Benjamin Willman, director of the PIF program, says that the fellows are matched up with offices that could use their skillsets.
“The mission is basically that we bring in top technologists, innovators from the private sector and they team up with leaders in government to work on some of the nation’s hardest problems,” said Willman. “We’ve been doing this for about six years. The fellows [have] had a lot of successes across about a half-dozen agencies. They stay for one to four years and they really try to bring into the government skills that the government has a hard time hiring on their own.”