Our government can certainly create an environment of innovation and entrepreneurship. If you are a smart phone user (iPhone or Droid), every application is being built, maintained and enhanced by technologists/developers. The makers of iPhone, Droid and other smart phones do not incur any cost of development and they split the profits (70-30). An entrepreneur keeps 70% profit and it costs zero to Apple & Google and they keep 30% and drive the innovation.

Governments can provide similar opportunities by opening their data of crime, sexual offenders, business data, land registration records, business registration data, traffic data so that entrepreneurs can build useful application for citizens and can also monetize. I was able to do www.crimeblotter.org in 2006 and we are still providing this service from my company free to citizens and at no cost to the government.