Sourcewell
When the Stakes Are Real, “Probably Right” Isn’t Good Enough
How a government innovation team uses IDC Quanta’s source-verified research to move faster on high-stakes decisions.
Government / Public Sector Cooperative
Every idea has to prove itself, fast.
Andrew Shipe is an Innovation Strategist on Sourcewell innovation team, Sourcewell Ventures. His job is finding new ways to serve public agencies where the market isn’t equipped, or motivated, to help. With a small, focused team, he has to be selective about what gets pursued. The hardest part is comparison: a county fleet department’s problem looks nothing like a fire department’s wildfire response, even though both are government agencies solving urgent, resource-constrained problems. Without a consistent way to evaluate opportunities across such different contexts, good ideas were easy to misjudge or lose to timing.
Numbers instead of guesswork.
One opportunity made the stakes of that challenge concrete. When agencies described drone-based first-responder programs as powerful but unaffordable, Sourcewell Ventures didn’t have a clear picture of why. Working with IDC and IDC Quanta, Shipe put real numbers behind what agencies were experiencing — turning a vague pain point into a defined problem the private market hadn’t solved. IDC Quanta’s inline footnotes let him verify every figure against its source article directly, solving what he called his biggest frustration with other AI tools: not knowing what was real and what was hallucinated.
Faster research, more shots on goal.
With so many ideas arriving from so many directions, Shipe’s team is constrained less by opportunity than by time to evaluate it. IDC Quanta changes that math: plugging in a new idea now returns enough grounded information, fast, to make a real go or no-go call — freeing the team to spend its limited hours on the opportunities worth deeper research.
Shipe called it a genuine leap forward from every other AI tool he’d used.
“One of my challenges with other AI tools is what is real and what is hallucinated. And the appeal of IDC Quanta was that it’s backed by specific articles and I could read them and make sure that the numbers I’m getting are correct.”
— Andrew Shipe, Innovation Strategist, Sourcewell