The chief of innovation in the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration wants to bring more entrepreneurs into government, perhaps as two-year fellows, she said on Wednesday.

“There is lots of entrepreneurial thinking in government—it’s surprising,” Julie Lenzer Kirk, director of Commerce’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, told small business owners at a conference of the American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council. But she added that when she ran the state of Maryland’s Center for Entrepreneurship, “I would tell business people, ‘You’re my tribe.’ When I got to government, I’m still trying to fit into the tribe.”