What the Public Sector Can Learn from Private Sector Creativity

By Jerry Silverman, Principal Solutions Consultant

In areas like cybersecurity, partnerships and information sharing between the public and private sectors are becoming increasingly necessary to protect the online networks of both industries. Having the ability to collaborate across sectors is critically important to helping governments, businesses and organizations improve their cybersecurity protocols.

But cybersecurity shouldn’t be the only area where public and private sectors collaborate.

According to Adobe’s Creativity in the Public Sector Survey, 94 percent of public sector employees say that government should be as creative as business, yet only 46 percent say government currently is as creative as business.

This gap between government organizations’ creative potential and the reality that public sector creatives face is a perfect opportunity to engage with the private sector to learn from their best practices and most creative ideas.

Respondents cited tech companies like Apple, Google and Amazon, as well as large corporations such as GE, WalMart, Disney and Deloitte as highly creative private sector companies. All of these companies have creative properties that set them apart from competitors and enable them to maximize the effectiveness of their communications to consumers.

What could Disney’s Imagineering team do to help rethink the look and feel of government websites? Could Google’s coders develop an algorithm to easily connect citizens with their elected officials?

While the private sector is ripe with examples of digital creativity, survey respondents did name NASA and the White House as two of the most creative public sector organizations. In terms of information sharing and collaboration, what could be better use-cases for the private sector? What private sector organization wouldn’t want to learn from the engineers and developers at NASA how to share information and images from across the galaxy with the world? And how could the social media and web teams at the White House that manage the President’s online communications help companies better connect their executives with their customers online? There are clearly areas of excellence across both sectors, but creativity is one area in which the private sector has jumped ahead.

Although the public sector hasn’t caught up with the private sector in creativity yet, we have the opportunity to have an important conversation between sectors about creativity and digital transformation. We’re proud to have worked with organizations like 18F and the U.S. Digital Service to help bring fresh ideas to the public sector.

Adobe believes creating these partnerships and opening up a dialogue about creativity will be an effective means to maximizing creativity in both sectors, and enabling government agencies to provide the highest quality, most effective creative communications.

Visit here to learn more about the Adobe Creativity in the Public Sector Survey and Adobe’s efforts to bridge the creativity gap.