Strategic Planning for Federal Health Care Innovation

A leading federal health care innovation office faced the challenge of aligning four distinct sub-programs under a unified and measurable multi-year strategic plan. While the office was nationally recognized for its pioneering work in clinical innovation, emerging technologies, and experiential learning, it required a more cohesive framework for prioritizing new initiatives, allocating funding, and measuring impact. Each of the office’s sub-programs brought its own legacy, stakeholders, and operating rhythm, making a unified strategy essential. Leadership faced mounting pressure to prioritize emerging initiatives, equitably allocate funding, and communicate the office’s value. At the same time, the team needed a better mechanism for evaluating and executing new ideas—without slowing down or stifling innovation.

The office engaged Blackberg to design and facilitate a comprehensive strategic planning process that re-grounded the organization in a unified mission and vision, while building the infrastructure for sustained execution. We began by leading a series of immersive, in-person offsites with the executive leadership team and key program staff. These sessions focused on clarifying the office’s north star—its purpose, promise, and long-term impact. Using convergent-divergent thinking, our team facilitated breakouts on individual programmatic aspirations then re-grouped to translate them into shared organizational language. Through this iterative process, our team helped co-create renewed Mission and Vision Statements that resonated across all sub-programs. 

With a renewed foundation in place, Blackberg supported quarterly strategic offsites to identify, validate, and align cross-cutting strategic goals with measurable programmatic objectives underneath. Our team then refined these strategic goals, objectives, and key performance indicators with mid-management and employees through iterative feedback sessions. This process ultimately informed a final Fiscal Year 2024-2026 Strategic Plan for the office. This strategic planning process not only strengthened strategic clarity across teams, but it also fostered a shared language for innovation investment, performance, and value creation. 

Recognizing the need for operational rigor without bureaucracy, Blackberg designed a lightweight but scalable review and governance process for emerging priorities after the plan’s development. At the center of this process was a custom pipeline tool, which enabled programs to submit new priorities for review. Leadership then evaluated initiatives based on alignment with strategic objectives, resource availability, and readiness for execution.

The office emerged from the engagement with a shared strategic foundation, a refined mission and vision, and a structured cadence for goal setting and priority management. Dozens of emerging priorities are now vetted each month through the new pipeline and using the strategic objectives set forth. The process has improved visibility into decision-making and resource allocation across the programs through a clear, repeatable process.  

Most importantly, the planning infrastructure enabled the office to remain responsive to change—ensuring it can evaluate new opportunities swiftly, while staying grounded in its long-term vision and measurable objectives. By pairing big-picture alignment with practical execution tools, the office is now positioned to scale its impact and serve as a model for innovation-driven strategy in the federal sector.