A playbook for the next generation of city innovators

Photos courtesy of: City of Freetown, Sierra Leone; Memphis River Parks Partnership; City of Los Angeles; Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University

January 3, 2015

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For over a decade, the Bloomberg Philanthropies-funded Innovation Team (i-team) program has supported cities in developing creative solutions to pressing local challenges, improving residents’ lives and fostering greater trust in government. Much of this progress has been built on a foundation of using data and evidence to scope problems, design responsive new interventions, and deliver measurable results. And, at its core, this approach remains the essential backbone of the innovation process in cities across the world.

But as cities have faced increasingly complex challenges, they've needed new tools, strategies, and approaches to tackle them. That’s why our partners at the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation recently published the Path to Public Innovation Playbook—a practical, example-rich guide for city leaders at any stage of their innovation journey. Crucially, the playbook offers learnings from the past 10-plus years of government innovation that can help municipalities take existing efforts to the next level.

From ambitious city-wide goals to innovative approaches for sourcing ideas and a more strategic focus on storytelling, the innovation toolkit has expanded significantly since Bloomberg Philanthropies launched this work in 2011. Here’s a closer look at key practices that have emerged or evolved in recent years—and how local leaders can put them into action.

Setting an Ambitious Impactful Mission (AIM) to unite the city.

Innovation has always started with defining major challenges in cooperation with residents. But in recent years, cities have increasingly tried to go further by working to unite every local actor around transformational changes that will be felt for generations. What they’re finding is that by establishing a North Star for action—the Playbook calls them Ambitious Impactful Missions (AIMs)—they’re achieving better outcomes. And the Playbook shows them how to find that North Star.

“If you limit yourself to thinking about a single priority, that can lead to a focus on just the things right in front of you,” explains Amanda Daflos, executive director of the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation and the former Chief Innovation Officer and director of the i-team in Los Angeles. In contrast, she says, a more ambitious, mission-style approach recognizes that “the whole city has to work on this.”

For instance, in Reykjavik, Iceland, local leaders are determined to improve outcomes for children. But rather than limiting the scope or scale of their efforts to one slice of that pursuit, they thought bigger, tapping a wide array of actors from the Department of Education to the Department of Welfare to pursue a vision called “A Better City for Children.” At its core, this effort is about delivering a massive array of new and improved services for kids and ensuring those services are not interrupted at any point in a young person’s life. Specific interventions range from at-home student counseling, to courses on improving communication within households, to strategy sessions for parents whose children have anxiety.

More noteworthy than the individual solutions is that this ambitious effort has shown signs of activating the kind of broad coalition needed to make long-term change. In fact, the larger vision started under then-Mayor Dagur Eggertsson, has been maintained by his successor, Mayor Einar Þorsteinsson, and has recently shown signs of expansion. The Playbook provides mayors with a framework for developing their own blueprints for big change.

Moving from human-centered to inclusive design.

The Path to Public Innovation Playbook offers city leaders a detailed guide through every step of the design process, including fundamentals of problem framing, research, and ideation. But it goes further than that, emphasizing how the field has grown to include awareness of the need for truly inclusive design—and the potential to source more and more ideas from outside city hall.

For example, innovators have always sought to center their work around the needs of people most impacted by a problem. But leaders in Orlando, Fla., recently demonstrated how hiring people with lived experience—in this case with homelessness—can help better tackle these challenges. Taking that step was instrumental in producing a slew of new ideas—and securing nearly $9 million in federal funding for the region to pursue them. City leaders can learn how to deploy elements of trauma-informed design and about additional examples—such as how the work was used to develop a new intake process for justice-involved youth in Philadelphia—in the Playbook and accompanying toolkit.

As part of the larger design process, city leaders are also increasingly calling on resources from outside government. For instance, the Playbook uplifts the value of crowdsourcing and problem-based procurement, which have been helping cities for years now to incentivize the development of new solutions by a wider variety of actors across the local landscape. And the Playbook spotlights the value of collaboration that goes beyond city agencies and even familiar private-sector partners to provide new resources and knowledge. For instance, innovators in Los Angeles teamed up with everyone from a global research center based on the other side of the country to a nearby Goodwill organization to upskill the team.

As Daflos explains, “It's about using different strategies to get people to join in.”

Taking storytelling efforts to the next level.

Another thing cities are prioritizing more than ever is building up capacity for storytelling. This isn’t just important to the success of individual new pilots and programs, but also for generating buy-in and long-term support for the most ambitious approaches to complex challenges. And the new Playbook offers a detailed perspective on how cities can get it done.

The Playbook describes storytelling as “the ability to understand audiences, make a compelling case for change, and articulate the value of initiatives in the innovation portfolio and innovation practices.” If that sounds simple enough, the reality is that cities can struggle to cut through the noise—as was the focus of the Mayors Innovation Studio at this past October’s Bloomberg CityLab in Mexico City. So the Playbook advises them to follow a few key steps, such as focusing on one essential idea, including details that evoke sensory experience, enabling the audience to relate on a human level, and making stories simple, memorable, and repeatable.

For instance, in Baltimore, the innovation team has recently used short, engaging videos full of personality—and starring local partners—to get the word out about ambitious efforts to tackle challenges such as vacant housing. Other cities are finding creative ways to use physical spaces to tell stories, too, such as the experiential look inside a facility recycling water—with graphics explaining why it matters—offered by leaders in Boise, Idaho.

What unites many of these efforts is a realization that the innovation process doesn’t stop at delivery—and that results don’t always speak for themselves. But when cities invest in telling stories, they reinforce the value of innovation, sustaining the work for the future.

“We often assume that people in the community, people in a civic realm, have had the same experience and have the same understanding, and that's generally not true,” Daflos says. “The exciting thing about innovation teams is that they have the actual capacity and the mission and the charge to be the chief explainers of government.”

And if they follow the latest strategies in the Path to Public Innovation Playbook, even more cities will be set up to deliver innovative new solutions—and, along with them, a city-wide narrative about the future.

Get your copy of the full Path to Public Innovation Playbook here.