These cities are using innovation to build more responsive, digital-enabled services

December 4, 2024

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Cities often grab attention for the acquisition, development, or implementation of new digital technologies. But real innovation is never just about the technology itself. Instead, it’s increasingly about using proven innovation strategies to create dynamic tools that can adapt to residents’ ever-evolving needs on the ground. From taking a problem-oriented approach that unifies local actors to developing new ways of staying in step with residents’ latest concerns to tapping public/private partnerships for a rapid rollout, cities are using innovation to put themselves in position to quickly and responsively deploy digital tools where they can have the greatest impact.

Here’s how they’re getting it done—and what it means for the people they serve.

Using a problem-oriented approach to spark urgent, whole-of-city action.

It’s one thing to have an in-house data team or digital agency tasked with digitizing as many services as possible. But without partnerships between agencies across government, these efforts may fail to deliver when they are most needed.

In Seattle, Mayor Bruce Harrell and his team were determined to help more residents access public support to pay for everything from food to childcare to utility bills. According to Leah Tivoli, director of innovation and performance in the city, getting to a solution started with using a design sprint to determine why only 40 percent of residents were getting the assistance they were eligible for. What the city’s Bloomberg Philanthropies-supported innovation team (i-team) found was that local government had effectively outsourced the process of signing people up for affordability resources to community groups that didn’t have the capacity to ensure, in a systematic way, that residents got the help they needed.

To address that challenge, Mayor Harrell used his Affordable Seattle initiative to bring together disparate agencies involved in social support, setting a deadline of a little over a year to get it done. This initiative laid the foundation for the wider success of the city’s CiviForm service, a digital tool that now serves as a one-stop-shop portal making it easier to apply for multiple benefits simultaneously. Over 30,000 residents have used it so far, with 20 percent of them applying to more than one kind of support from the city.

The affordability mission “was a much more powerful and much more creative place to begin than starting from a technology perspective of, ‘We're going to just digitize everything,’” Tivoli tells Bloomberg Cities.

Inviting residents to set the direction—even if it's not where you expected.

In the radically different context of wartime Kyiv, local leaders faced their own version of the same challenge of getting every department on board with urgent new priorities. According to Oleg Polovynko, advisor to Mayor Vitali Klitschko on digitalization, what was key was taking a 360-degree view of the local landscape of service delivery and constantly asking a critical question: Are we building something people actually need?

“You have to be ready to not only ask, ‘Do you like this button on the left or on the right?’" but whether residents need a service at all, Polovynko says.

One way Kyiv is getting this done is by using its petition functionality on the city’s digital platform to invite residents to request new services. “We are asking closed and open questions,” Victoria Itskovych, the city’s chief information officer, tells Bloomberg Cities. “So [an] open question is usually, ‘what should we build?’ But [a] closed question is, like: ‘These are our propositions. Please vote for what is the most essential for you.’”

Among the services the city is now offering in direct response to resident feedback: a personalized indicator of impending power outages, which are deliberately scheduled to reduce strain on an electric grid that has come under withering assault. Now, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the city is developing a suite of mental-health supports to help people manage the trauma of war. But rather than designing the services in an isolated lab, leaders have been informed by nearly 27,000 resident-submitted responses to an app-delivered survey. This, in turn, has enabled the city to begin rolling out new services like Mental Guard, which is geared at providing rapid-response psychological help to schoolchildren.

Using public-private partnerships to get over the finish line faster.

Armed with a clear problem focus and iterative feedback from residents, cities may still need additional capacity to actually bring their digital efforts to life. In Bogotá, that means using public-private partnerships to bypass traditional roadblocks to the speedy rollout of new services.

“Our approach is not necessarily to buy a solution, but rather building it ourselves in-house,” explains Santiago Amador, who directed the city’s i-team. Whenever possible, the city creates its own products, mirroring the “software factory” approach taken by the innovation agency in Mexico City. But because of the way bureaucracies work, it can take months too long to hire a new developer to take on any given challenge.

So, Bogotá is experimenting with an approach that centers on what they call a “design taskforce”—a public/private partnership that can make its own temporary hires quickly to support the innovation process. Essentially, the city allocates funds in a private, not-for-profit agency that is more flexible and agile in the process of procuring goods and short-term services. “So now, if we happen to need a front-end developer immediately, we ask this agency, and we can hire in just two or three days,” Amador explained in a panel at Bloomberg CityLab in October.

Funding for this public/private approach can come from a host of sources—local businesses, multilateral development banks, philanthropy, or elsewhere. The point is that the city makes its digital efforts nimbler—and capable of rapid response.

“The most difficult part of government innovation is about uncertainty and rigid procedures,” Amador says. “You don't know what is going to come up.” This way, he adds, cities are ready to act no matter what.

Ultimately, what local leaders are finding is that by applying innovation tactics to the way they consider new digital tools—taking a problem-oriented approach that provides focus, finding new ways to ensure their latest projects are aligned with resident needs, and tapping every resource they can from outside of government—they’re not just digitizing for the sake of digitization. Instead, they’re providing vital services when, where, and how they are most needed—and creating flexible supports that can adapt to new developments.

“We had to put in place the mechanisms to be very agile to the problems we have,” Itskovych says.