How one mayor built an innovation culture, step by step

Innovation doesn’t have to be flashy to change lives. Sometimes, what makes the biggest difference is when a mayor takes seemingly simple, deliberate steps to put civil servants in position to try new things and work in new ways so they can better tackle whatever is most urgent in their communities. That’s what’s happening in Knoxville, Tenn., where Mayor Indya Kincannon has, over the past several years, helped position her team to develop innovative approaches at addressing everything from gun violence to building-permit bottlenecks. A closer look at these steps through the eyes of individual Knoxville city employees offers insights that can help other city leaders as they aim to build stronger cultures of risk-taking and experimentation. 

Branding new projects so every actor in the city pays attention.

Any new city project or initiative is only worth the resources and political capital invested in it. And in Knoxville, there are few civil servants who can better speak to that than LaKenya Middlebrook.

After the city’s East District saw 24 homicides in 2022, Mayor Kincannon—who has participated in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative—tapped Middlebrook to launch a new program dubbed Project TLC, or Tender Loving Care. The objective was clear: Get violent crime under control. At its core, the effort uses data to identify high-risk neighborhoods and then provides them with more police patrols and new services, from expedited stop-sign repair to training for parents on helping their kids handle emotional turmoil. From the start, Kincannon’s focus on not just launching something new, but giving it a strong, relatable identity, was key to helping Middlebrook bring the program to life.

That started with the mayor personally taking part in door-to-door canvasses, a cornerstone of Project TLC geared at determining what residents of any given area need to feel safe in their neighborhoods. “It says a lot when the mayor is in her City of Knoxville polo jacket in the rain, talking to you at your door in your housing project or at your house in your neighborhood about blighted property and dirty lots and why they make you feel unsafe,” Middlebrook, the city’s first director of community safety and empowerment, tells Bloomberg Cities. 

The mayor has shown that same commitment behind the scenes by, for example, simply picking up the phone when Middlebrook has had a tough time bringing a new partner on board. “Part of why this works, it's not only a collaboration between our internal city departments, but also with community-based partners,” Middlebrook explains. “And so if the mayor is invested in this, then we can get our housing authority to be involved in this. We can get service providers to show up and be involved in this. We can get faith leaders to show up and be involved in this.”

As of July, homicides across Knoxville were down 64 percent compared to the same period of time in 2024, and Middlebrook and her team are now working with the University of Tennessee to conduct a scientific evaluation of their approach and its impact on crime trends. Going forward, they know the mayor’s support will continue to be instrumental as they fine-tune their strategy. “It’s not only about pushing us to collaborate,” Middlebrook says. “The mayor is a part of the collaboration. She's physically showing up and participating in the activities, which sends a message that I believe in what my people are doing.”

Trusting teams to use convening power in new ways.

If one key ingredient for civil servants’ success is visible mayoral buy-in that helps them rally the support needed to deliver on projects, another is the trust to use the mayor’s convening power in their own creative ways.

In Knoxville, that’s been most evident in housing. Developers had grown frustrated with long turnaround times from city permitting staff, who themselves were struggling with low morale—all of which was creating a bottleneck for new home construction. In response, Mayor Kincannon took a fairly standard step by creating a “developers roundtable” to explore improvements to the process, but then, critically, went further by empowering her team to use that platform however they needed to move the needle.

According to Knoxville Chief Operating Officer Grant Rosenberg, the city and its developer partners co-created benchmarks for how long it should take to review different kinds of building plans. In doing so, they reached a shared conclusion: The city needed more staff to get it done. So Rosenberg ultimately used the roundtable the mayor created not just to brainstorm but actually advocate for increased permitting fees to the city council, which passed them in late 2023. Within months of their passage, the city hired nine new staff and began hitting new benchmarks, such as reviewing residential plans in an average of six days as opposed to 13 under the old system. 

The way Rosenberg sees it, it’s no sure-thing that a mayor would be pleased when a key takeaway from their developer convening was to ask the city council to raise fees and hire more staff. But Kincannon put Rosenberg and others in position to try something different, and it’s paying off. 

“Empowering me and the team and trusting and supporting us” was essential, he says.

Showing the team they don’t have to fear failure.

Mayoral branding and convening power are powerful tools for civil servants. And in Knoxville, they’re amplified by another foundational one: a mayor who has sent a clear signal that experimentation is key, and failure is nothing to be afraid of.

Right now, that’s coming through clearly with how the city is approaching artificial intelligence. “There are some mayors who might look at the current AI landscape and say, ‘This is something that we need to be more worried about than excited about,’” explains Carter Hall, Knoxville’s deputy director of service innovation. Kincannon, on the other hand, has encouraged Hall at every turn to push harder and find ways to make use of the technology to deliver tangible gains for residents. That means moving beyond the city’s chatbot to explore how AI can further expedite the plan-review process and how AI agents can improve the city’s 311 system.

“She trusts us to be smart about it, to put the guardrails where they need to be, but also to unleash the tools that are going to be helpful,” Hall says.

These civil servants’ experiences reveal something crucial: Mayors set the ambition, laying out a vision for change. But it’s only when they offer their teams internal and external validation and room for experimentation that big change becomes possible.

As Mayor Kincannon explains, “I have tried to really empower my staff to know that I welcome their new ideas, and that I want them to embrace change—not change for change’s sake, but change to make our city better.”