Who we are
We are a small team within the Executive Office at MassDOT. We work in the gray areas between and beyond MassDOT's divisions to:
- Test the delivery and implementation of new (or new to us) services, policies, programs, products or ideas
- Start with a smaller version of an idea, so we can learn quickly and scale up or pivot
- Allow the organization to take calculated risks, in contexts that make sense
- Act as an on-ramp for external partners — in Massachusetts and beyond — to engage with MassDOT
- Defy expectations and inspire curiosity
How we do it
We, test, prototype, try (and own it when we fail), experiment, and build. We pick up a plan off a shelf and find a way to kick the tires on an action that's listed inside. We hear good ideas from residents or cities and towns or from other states and see if we can adapt them to our context here in Massachusetts. We have a bias toward implementation and a belief in the possibility of what government can do.
Things that are usually (always) true for our work:
- We work in collaboration with at least one MassDOT division or department and at least one external agency.
- We have a civic research question or set of questions we are trying to learn about through hypothesis-driven prototyping.
- We tell the story — the whole story — honestly and in a timely fashion.
Other requests beyond our scope
Governments can be confusing – there are lots of acronyms, divisions, departments, and secretariats. MassDOT has some very talented teams and you might be thinking what we do is actually more of what they do.
A few examples come to mind:
- Data analytics are reported by the Office of Performance Management and Innovation
- Academic research is managed by our Office of Transportation Planning
- Physical science is done by our Research and Materials Lab
In fact, there is likely a long list of things we are not, but we are more than happy to help you track down the right people if it’s not us.