These cities are daring every civil servant to be an innovator
November 21, 2024
Listen to This Article
Cities everywhere have already proven that when they invest in innovation, they deliver game-changing solutions that improve residents’ lives and strengthen their communities. Now, as they look to deepen and fortify these efforts so they can take on ever more complex challenges, a critical next step will be to provide opportunities for more and more city employees to contribute their ideas, energy, and talent to the innovation process.
This leap—from innovation labs and teams at the margins of the public sector to citywide approaches that are open to virtually everyone in local government—remains a work in progress in most cities. Yet there are some efforts—to collect ideas from everyone in city hall, to spread innovation skills across every agency, and to create playbooks that can be used for virtually any challenge—that are already producing insights that can inform and inspire local leaders looking to take that next step.
Recognizing that good ideas can come from anywhere.
For more than a decade, Bloomberg Philanthropies has helped dozens of cities around the world launch in-house innovation teams that use human-centered design, collaboration, and other tools to develop new solutions. Now, these and other cities are finding ways to decentralize the process by inviting contributions from everyone who works in city hall—even if innovation isn’t in their job description.
Take Boise, Idaho. There, Director of Innovation and Performance Kyle Patterson—whose city took part in training with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative—wanted to create space for good ideas to be heard by leadership. So he tested a mechanism to achieve that: a city-hall innovation challenge asking employees in every agency for their proposals for how to advance any city goal, such as one of the mayor’s strategic priorities, using incentives like a raffle to encourage participation.
“Staff are hungry for this,” Patterson tells Bloomberg Cities. “They have a lot of great ideas. In some ways we were too successful: we had so many ideas, the organization felt overwhelmed with all of them.”
Ultimately, more than 500 staff contributed or helped shape over 700 ideas—about 60 of which have been selected for implementation. Among the proposals that have come to life since the city opened the door to creativity from everyone across each department: a “compost cam” to help residents see for themselves if compost is available at designated locations, an e-bike-powered mobile library program, and new benefits for city employees, such as reimbursement for some adoption costs.
While Patterson is careful to note that spreading innovation culture citywide remains a work in progress in Boise, he found that the ideas challenge—which he plans to replicate in the future, perhaps with a narrower focus on specific city priorities—came with an added bonus. By creating a forum for employees to think differently—and, critically, be heard—he also helped city leaders be more open to creative ideas from the people they manage, and be more comfortable about crowd-sourcing solutions.
In Aarhus, Denmark, the city is using elements of mission-driven innovation to tackle complex challenges such as improving health outcomes for every resident. As part of that effort, leaders created a pathway to provide innovation skills to the managers across the various agencies spearheading the work.
The vehicle for this upskilling is a team in the mayor’s office that leads capacity-building workshops—essentially, training—for managers who may have little or no previous exposure to innovation. Participants might learn about everything from problem definition and prototyping to how to assemble portfolios of interventions to better ways they can engage residents and stakeholders. Additionally, the team has been working with dozens of strategic leaders on how they can actively partner with residents, nonprofits, and other actors in building coalitions and creating change. To further open up this work, a recent event organized by the mayor gathered 150 key players from across every sector of society to pursue collective mobilization work together.
According to Trine Kiil Naldal, co-leader of the mayor’s capacity-building team, the aim is to do more than take on the city’s current priorities. It’s to create a cultural shift in the way everyone throughout city hall thinks about how to solve problems.
“We would like it to be a bit contagious,” she says of the training.
Building toolkits that employees can use on any challenge.
Another way some cities, such as Bogotá, are driving innovation into the core of how local government works is by creating playbooks that spell out methodology for the next generation of innovators, both in and outside of city hall.
Right now, the Bloomberg Philanthropies-funded innovation team (i-team) in the city is redesigning a few local services, such as health certifications for businesses—and, in doing so, developing a guide for how to use innovation to evaluate and redesign other services provided by the government. The team is calling it the “services clinic,” and the idea, according to Juliahna Green, a senior advisor at the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University who works with Bogotá, is that when any agency identifies a need to overhaul a service in the future, “they will have a framework, a curriculum, and essentially a hotline for how to do so.”
This work also includes publishing broader guides for city employees on the nuts and bolts of innovation, such as an introduction to systems thinking. The hope is to make innovation and the underlying terminology as digestible and accessible as possible, so it can be embraced by actors across city hall, from the mayor’s office to rank-and-file civil servants.
And Bogotá’s example-setting focus doesn’t stop at the city hall walls, according to Roland Persaud, innovation program officer at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “They have a whole ecosystem approach that they’re taking to spread this work—to universities and even the private sector,” he says. That includes members of the i-team teaching innovation courses at Los Andes University, and making a concerted effort to create a pipeline of young people into public-sector innovation.
As Green notes of the i-team, “They say all the time: ‘We're a team of only 12 people. We can only do so much good work.’ So the way they're choosing to scale is by teaching others how to do it, too."
Read More
