Miami-Dade Innovation Authority

Public excellence offers a more practical way to define and evaluate government performance. Unlike the concept of public good, which is broad and aspirational, public excellence introduces a clearer standard rooted in how services are experienced and how systems deliver in practice.

At the center of this framework are two essential dimensions: experience and ex*****on. Experience assesses whether public services reflect how people actually live and interact with systems. Ex*****on assesses whether those systems operate effectively, move with intention, and produce measurable outcomes over time.

Together, these ideas help shift the conversation from principle alone to performance in action.

This perspective is drawn from When the Public Good Isn’t Good Enough: How Defining Public Excellence Improves Government Effectiveness by Leigh-Ann Buchanan, President and CEO of MDIA. Visit mdia.miami/impact to see how MDIA is helping governments test, validate, and advance solutions that improve quality of life.

MDIA’s Public Innovation Challenge No. 8, Optimizing Water Operations in Miami-Dade County, is focused on identifying technology-driven solutions that can be piloted within one of the largest and most complex water and wastewater systems in the United States.

Through this challenge, early-to-growth-stage companies are invited to apply with solutions ready to be tested in a real-world operational environment, in collaboration with Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department (WASD), the Miami-Dade Department of Environmental Resource Management (DERM) and Florida International University(FIU) Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Selected companies will receive a $100,000 investment to support pilot implementation, testing, and validation.

This challenge is designed to surface solutions that can strengthen water and sewer operations across areas such as resource recovery, infrastructure performance, predictive operations, asset management, and data-driven system planning.

Applications open May 19.

Apply through the link in bio.