The leaders bringing the innovation mindset into the mainstream

While innovation was once confined to small pockets of city halls, it is increasingly a must-have capability in high demand across the entirety of local government. What that means in practice is that cities are seeking—and deploying—civil servants with mindsets for constant experimentation, ambitious problem-solving, and bold solutions for both mounting challenges and better service delivery. And one of the ways they’re doing so is by positioning seasoned innovators, including veterans of the Bloomberg Philanthropies-funded Innovation Team (i-team) program, in new roles—giving them fresh opportunities and greater resources with which to drive impact for residents.

In Durham, N.C., a former i-team director is leading a brand-new city agency designed with data analysis and collaboration at its very foundation. In Kansas City, Mo., former i-team leaders are using city-wide managerial roles to inject and nurture a spirit of experimentation in virtually every agency. And in Minneapolis, a former i-team designer is providing political leadership that uplifts the value of these same approaches in the public conversation, bringing them to the entire city. What unites these and similar efforts is that they’re sustaining the innovation mindset and embedding it in new places—unlocking progress on some of the most pressing issues cities face.

Launching a new agency with data and cross-collaboration at the core.

In Durham, Ryan Smith—who previously directed the city’s i-team—is now leading its Community Safety Department. The agency was created in 2021 to launch what became HEART, an alternative-to-911 service that provides rapid crisis support from trained but unarmed professionals, in part to reduce the likelihood of violence when residents seek help from authorities in emergency situations. But in some ways, he sees the team he’s built—and the way they’ve gone about developing a new service and collaborating with essential city providers—as a next-generation i-team.

“I'm building this new department with that core capacity in mind,” Smith tells Bloomberg Cities.

What does that look like? For starters, the new service began with a comprehensive approach to user research, engaging residents who might interact with 911 personnel to understand what they would seek in an alternative.

The research effort spanned robust engagement with affected communities, intensive data analysis of previous 911 calls and their outcomes, ride-alongs with police, and much more. And what Smith and his team learned was that if a new emergency service was going to be accepted and effective, it needed to be deliberate about everything, from the ways first responders (and their vehicles) appeared—and how that might impact comfort and trust among residents—to the unique combination of supplies that responders would need to bring to calls. In doing so, he also saw the need for a special kind of collaboration with the police and fire and emergency medical personnel who were already delivering critical services.

To make that collaboration systematic, the community safety team built a coalition that includes the police chief, who has become an advocate for change. And now the agency—which has responded to 25,000 calls, saving thousands of hours for other service providers—is beginning to have a spillover effect throughout other departments. In fact, city leaders have asked Smith’s team to share their iteration process with the city’s broader public safety portfolio.

“A lot of innovation work, at the end of the day, is about how to build a coalition of the willing,” Smith says. Now, by creating regular outlets for his new agency to do things such as praising individual patrol-officer partners, sharing data practices with other departments, and spotlighting the contributions of this new service to the larger safety agenda, he and his team are not just winning over colleagues. They’re modeling approaches that can be used on every local challenge.

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Nurturing experimentation across virtually every city agency.

If embedding a mindset for data-powered collaboration at the foundation of a brand-new agency is one way to spread innovation across city hall, another is to manage and lead almost every city agency with a spirit of de-risking and experimentation.

That’s exactly what Brian Platt and Melissa Kozakiewicz are doing in Kansas City. As veterans of the i-team in Jersey City, N.J., they now serve as city manager and assistant city manager, respectively, in their new home. The city already had a long history of local government innovation, including a focus on data-driven decision making. But one thing Platt and Kozakiewicz have found is that being in a leadership role with a broad portfolio has given them the ability to work with everyone to take existing innovation efforts to the next level.

“Kansas City was already known as a place with a creative spirit inside local government,” Platt says. “We simply helped harness that energy by working alongside city leaders, neighbors, and our Mayor [Quinton Lucas] and City Council to deploy new tools that ultimately are delivering real change.” And the impact of their city-wide focus on trying new things is accumulating. On the transit and climate fronts alone, the city has built 50 miles of protected bike lanes, converted nearly 100,000 street lights to LED—the carbon impact of which is equivalent to taking 6,000 cars off the road—and built up formidable EV infrastructure that rivals similarly-sized cities.

Kozakiewicz describes encouraging risk-taking in every local service—such as street sweeping and snow plowing—rather than just new projects. One fresh experiment she’s pursuing is to outfit a street sweeper vehicle with a furry exterior to make it seem like an animal or creature—and turn a seemingly mundane service into a “spectacular” display.

But it’s not just about fun. Emphasizing creativity in a core service like this is also about telling a story about how innovation can drive results and, in doing so, generating buy-in for more ambitious ideas.

And the new ideas are often flowing from the ground-up, rather than the top-down, reflecting the passion and interest of civil servants in making government more effective and impactful. "Sometimes my job is just to make sure I'm not standing in the way," she says.

Creating room for ambition in local government.

Just as these i-team veterans are embedding their mindsets in new agencies and the larger city machinery, Elliott Payne—a former designer on the Minneapolis i-team who now serves as city council president—sees his new role as tapping that same mindset in sometimes contentious public debates to break deadlocks and fast-track change.

That means creating the space for civil servants inside local government to take more risks.

“When you're working at the staff level, your constraints feel very fixed and immovable—and that can really restrict your ability to imagine better futures,” Payne tells Bloomberg Cities. From his new position, he explains, he can press for changes that give the city more room for ambition, whether that means pushing for a new law or winning over an innovation-wary elected official. 

For example, the city is currently figuring out how to reconstruct a sensitive public space named after George Floyd. Payne isn’t an employee of the public works agency, and he doesn’t represent the district in question. But he does have the platform to encourage all the key stakeholders to try more recent approaches, such as a user-centered design process that accounts for everything the city has gone through over the past five years. And, as new challenges and approaches emerge, he’ll be in prime position to advocate for the city to keep building new innovation muscles—and piloting new solutions—for the future.

“I'm hoping that I can help be a bridge between some of the tensions and disciplines and work that needs to happen,” he says.