Yes, City Hall should embrace innovation. But what is the right path for your city?
One of the unintended consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to highlight how important it is for local governments to be adaptable and open to new ideas. The Bloomberg Philantropies’ Local Action Tracker shows city halls rushing to respond not only by adapting their current services to our socially distant world, but also by innovating and partnering up to contain the epidemic, provide food for people who can’t access it, or to soften the blow to local businesses.
Innovating — creating new, implementable and impactful ideas — is incredibly important for public sector institutions. Innovation should not only be a consideration at moments of crisis, and we should ask: what have cities been doing to institutionalize innovation?
One route that cities have taken is the creation of internal innovation departments.
Last year, as a part of our joint Policy Analysis Exercise at Harvard Kennedy School, the City of Sioux Falls, SD, asked for our help in figuring out a strategy to scale its public innovation efforts. My colleagues Lisa Setrakian, Arjun Shah and I, spent months interviewing the leading practitioners of local government innovation throughout the United States.
After looking at the 89 city innovation teams in the OECD’s report on enhancing innovation capacity in city government and the 21 Chief Innovation Officers listed by GovTech, and interviewing several of them, we realized that innovation can have very different meanings.
Based on our observations, we divided 4 main innovation missions (or types) that cities tend to follow. This was relevant as it revealed how they conceive of public value and how they deploy their resources.
The multiple roles of urban innovation
Let’s dig deeper into what each one of these types mean:
- Service redesign: These innovation teams take a look at a existing processes already in place and leverage new techniques (from lean six sigma to machine learning) to reassemble them and either provide more value or save in costs. Think of Denver’s Peak Academy, where city employees are encouraged to propose work processes that they own for redesign, as they receive training in change management.
- Performance management: These innovation teams play more of an oversight role. They are concerned with incorporating more data in the decision-making process and setting clear goals as a way to drive innovation. In Somerville, the team at SomerStat hosts regular open meetings where public officials discuss the evolution of operational data and whether or not new initiatives are moving the needle.
- Technology promotion: These innovation teams are all about leveraging the latest technological advancements and bringing them to City Hall. These teams usually pursue public private partnerships to ensure that the city can either provide or use new technologies such as 5G, the sensorization of public assets, or the Internet of Things. The Emerging Technology Initiative at Kansas City and its use of transit sensors to create publicly available visualizations of the data.
- Problem-oriented experimentation: These innovation teams are attempting to tackle the more hairy urban challenges (wicked problems in the public administration literature). These are issues that may require collaboration, a deep understanding of the root causes and disciplined interventions. Long Beach, for example, congregated a cross-agency team to look at the problems of the criminal justice system at the local level and iteratively test potential solutions through its Justice Lab.
Takeaways and discussion
- It’s hard to make comparison across types. We did not want to make judgements about which type of innovation role is better for a city. The point is that there is fundamental differences in what is pursued by each type, each with intrinsic value. There may be value in both experimenting around a complex policy issue such as homelessness (problem-oriented experimentation) and there may be value in redesigning an outdated permitting system for restaurant owners (service redesign).
- Trade-off between results and complexity. The typology highlights a frequent tension between the complexity that an innovation team is willing to tackle on one hand, and the need for quick results and ease of implementation on the other. Taking existing processes and making them more efficient (service redesign) may start saving dollars or time straight away. But that perspective may be more limited if an issue is complex enough — again, take homelessness as an example— that an innovative response requires you to rethink your provision of services from the start. The flip side is that the implementation and long-term success of those reinventions is incredibly hard to manage as they may require extensive sustained collaborations, which is why many of the problem-oriented experimentation groups we talked to placed a great deal of emphasis on carving out time to figuring out a scaling strategy. In turn, performance management groups may seek to tackle the more complex issues and busting silos by setting the right common metrics and aligning the incentives of appropriate agencies towards meeting them.
- Who you hire and how you structure your work should be aligned with strategy. Because these innovation types differ, it is apparent that the capacities that you need to bolster to be effective will change significantly from one type to the next. A performance management strategy may require analysts who can effectively work with municipal departments to establish the right goals for innovation. A problem-oriented experimentation approach may need to bring in people who understand human-centered design methodologies in order to enriches the perspective on an issue with the needs of constituents. A technology promotion team will evidently require technologists who can speak both the language of City Hall and that of next generation ICT advancements.
A city cannot create a new department every time they want to rethink a problem. On the other hand, the status quo has proven insufficient in adapting to modern challenges. Innovation offices are a way to balance these two facts. Which of the four innovation types is most desirable is still up for discussion.
