Overcoming the false dichotomy of urban innovation

Fifteen years into the public innovation movement, one question still comes up repeatedly in city halls whose leaders are eager to solve the most difficult problems: Should cities invest in a dedicated innovation team, or should they focus on building innovation capabilities across the wider civil service?

It's an understandable question. With limited resources, many city leaders assume they have to choose. But in our work with cities around the world at the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University, the organization I lead, we've found that the strongest cities don't treat these as competing priorities. They see them as mutually reinforcing. Dedicated innovation teams play a powerful role in helping cities navigate complexity, test new approaches, and demonstrate what’s possible. At the same time, lasting change that advances beyond prototypes and pilots requires department leaders, frontline staff, and cross-functional teams to align and adopt innovation approaches in their own respective operating environments. 

That’s why I believe the way forward is to embrace a two-pronged approach: Build new innovation capacity that helps civil servants alter legacy systems from within, while also ensuring the efforts of innovation teams, when cities have them, swim deeper into the system of city hall. 

Here’s how cities are starting to position themselves to get it done.

Mainstreaming the skills.

It’s critical that rank-and-file public servants have their own understanding of what innovation looks like in practice. And cities are, more than ever, finding that introductory training produces real results, suggesting a relatively small investment in developing common skills and language can begin to change how they solve problems.

For example, staff from some 150 cities have, with our support, recently explored the foundational skills and mindsets at the heart of the innovation toolkit. That means members of these cities’ staff are now familiar with the importance of resident voice in deeply understanding a problem. They recognize that relationships across different city agencies can be vital in addressing complex challenges. They know that ideation can boost their problem-solving creativity. And they understand the necessity of telling the story of ambitious new solutions to achieve durable results. Critically, the cities spreading these mindsets are finding that their staff aren’t just willing but hungry to understand new ways of working. One participant noted that she valued “learning to think outside the box, even while working within the municipal administration, something I thought was impossible.” 

Regardless of how cities carry it out, the impact of introducing staff to innovation in this way goes beyond the effect it has on individual civil servants. By demystifying innovation, this sort of training can also lay the groundwork for the potential launch of a formal—and integrated—innovation team down the line if cities don’t already have one in place. And that, in turn, can set them up to unlock transformational new solutions.

The overarching lesson? Whether you have an innovation team or not, make it crystal clear to everyone across your city that they, too, can be an innovator, including by guiding them through the basic skills and mindset shifts they need to get started.

Showing what the work means for every agency.

The sociologist Richard Sennett argues that craft and skill are built through repetition, practice, and tacit knowledge, not just formal instructions. In other words, thinking happens through making. And in that spirit, cities are learning not just to speak the language of innovation, but to use practice sessions to build footholds for new ways of working inside every municipal agency, so innovation directly touches daily operations. 

In cities such as Alexandria, Va., and Austin, Texas, for instance, civil servants from as many as 20 departments have jointly role-played the development of a series of ideas to tackle complex challenges facing a fictional local government. This is helping participants connect the dots between collective creativity, community insights, data analysis, and experimentation as they think about both short- and long-term change. The practice sessions are also pushing them to build muscles for future collaboration. 

What’s most exciting is that those who participate in simulations like these are turning into ambassadors for innovation back in their own departments. That, in turn, makes agencies more likely to serve as willing supporters of and collaborators with dedicated innovation teams in the future.

Whether they pursue citywide exercises or not, cities need to make sure staff see clear evidence of how innovation can change their own day-to-day workflow inside their respective departments. And that can start with something as simple as making sure someone in each agency has been given the space and mandate to experience what a more innovative approach to their operations might look like.

Bridging the gap between ideas and delivery.

Once cities have demystified innovation and started to show what it means for personnel in each department, they still need to find better ways to demonstrate how new ideas can lead to broad impact. In our experience, that means treating prototypes not as a goal unto themselves, but as a tool for faster implementation at scale. The intent is not simply to experiment more, but to shorten the distance between learning what works and embedding it in the way city hall operates. 

For example, Orlando, Fla., recently tested a high-fidelity prototype to advance their ambition that, by 2030, every resident will have access to healthy food. Instead of being consumed by prolonged internal deliberation, staff responsible for volunteer activation, fleet and facilities, and sustainability and resilience quickly trialled the harvest of uncollected, locally-grown produce at an urban farm. The idea was to understand the untapped resources (such as idle, city-owned vehicles) as well as operational challenges (such as keeping volunteers engaged and motivated) involved with expanding access to fresh food that would otherwise go to waste.

To ensure they can advance from prototyping to implementation quickly, the city used problem-solving workshops that expanded the circle of people involved in thinking through delivery, from residents to community organizations to a wider cross-section of city hall staff. By rapidly field-testing how they might collect and distribute healthy food to residents in need and collectively reflecting on the insights from that prototype, leaders gained confidence in deploying novel solutions and managing risk. 

Orlando’s work is still in progress. But their approach points to something cities everywhere can consider: Spreading innovation practices isn’t just about finding more great solutions, whether those solutions are developed by an innovation team or, as in Orlando’s case, rank-and-file civil servants. It’s about speeding up delivery of change people can see and feel, and then making it stick for the long-term.

If local governments are to meet the scale and complexity of today’s multi-dimensional challenges, innovation cannot remain the isolated responsibility of a small group of specialists. It has to become central to how city hall functions. The end game isn’t innovation for its own sake, but an organization that understands how innovation works, embeds it in each agency, and turns new ideas into better outcomes for residents. Building that kind of capability takes sustained investment, but cities do not have to choose between creating dedicated innovation teams and equipping the broader workforce. The most effective cities will often invest in both, recognizing that a combined approach is the surest way to change how government operates.