This article was written by Jorrit de Jong, senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and faculty director at Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, Fernando Monge, senior associate at Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, and Adam Hawksbee, research fellow at Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.

Innovations are key to solving the challenges cities face. But even the best innovation won’t change the public sector overnight.

For this reason, the most successful city leaders are shifting focus from individual innovations towards processes of innovating. The latest trends in practice and research show that the very best go even further, focusing on the conditions that promote a culture of innovativeness.

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Through our work we have identified the “five Es” – evidence, empathy, engagement, engineering and ensembles –  that are ingrained in the DNA of innovative organisations.

Problem-solvers in cities should seek to harness these elements in order to foster an innovative culture. But, before we describe these in detail, it is important to first understand the recent trends that underpin this DNA.

Cities are the key site of public sector innovation

City leaders have some of the toughest jobs in town. They have to put out fires, both figuratively and literally, on a daily basis.

This pressure to deliver has pushed cities to the forefront of innovation. In their fight against real fires, some cities use data to target fire inspections, while others co-produce neighbourhood safety with citizens or implement congestion pricing to tackle pollution.

Hundreds of similar creative problem-solving innovations have been recognised by the Innovations in American Government Awards program at the Ash Center in Harvard since the mid-1980s. Cities are the level of government most recognised by the program over its three decades.

Shifting focus to innovating

Innovation remains a central aspiration of many city governments, but the focus is changing.

“Innovation remains a central aspiration of many city governments, but the focus is changing”

One-off innovations, such as the use of data analytics are important, but these are often difficult to implement.

Innovations push organisations to adjust their structures – a process that often leads to resistance from those forced to adapt or those who incur losses.

For that reason, many governments try to get better at the work of innovating, for example, by creating unconventional initiatives to break down silos and enable the generation of new ideas.

The CitiStat performance leadership and management program in Baltimore is a prime example. In biweekly meetings, the manager of each city agency must respond to the mayor’s questions about progress on core indicators from CitiStat's statistical analyses in front of other department heads.

The program does not pursue blame, but rather enhances personal accountability, finds common solutions to roadblocks and provides a tangible opportunity for management and city staff to find their voice, be heard and request the support, authority or authorisation to pursue new ideas.

What makes a city hall innovative?

At the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, we are working with leaders around the world to equip them with the tools to lead high-performing, innovative cities. In our experience, the top performers are those who look for ways to make governments innovative in a more systematic way.

The challenge is to make sure that the capability to innovate is not monopolised by a handful of change agents in the organisation, but instead is widely distributed within city hall.

Rather than breaking down silos around specific problems, some cities try to instil the innovative ethos in daily operations.

“The creation of chief innovation officer positions or the integration of innovation teams in the city hall organisation are laudable attempts at making innovation a core aspect of a city’s culture”

The creation of chief innovation officer positions or the integration of innovation teams in the city hall organisation are laudable attempts at making innovation a core aspect of a city’s culture.

These are all positive trends, but it doesn’t answer the challenging question city leaders face: what are the structural building blocks of an innovative organisation?

The five Es of innovative DNA

The answer to this question is far from easy, but city leaders with the will to strengthen the innovativeness of their organisations are not left without support.

Through our work, we have identified trends and captured them in the five Es of an innovative organisation’s DNA:

  1. Evidence: Innovative governments use data to better understand challenges, evaluate progress and drive performance. To tackle entrenched illegal waste dumping, the city of Long Beach performed a detailed data analysis and mapped the user’s waste collection services experience. Equipped with this evidence, the city could understand the underlying issues behind the problem and devise effective initiatives to tackle it.
  2. Empathy: Innovative governments include the human dimension in all stages of their activity: problem definition, conceptualisation, implementation and evaluation. San Jose, Stockton and Reykjavik have all addressed homelessness by working closely with individuals who are or who have been homeless to understand the problem and design solutions that truly address their needs.
  3. Engagement: Innovative governments are intentional about incorporating community input and deliberate about setting the stage for co-creation, which strengthens the focus, legitimacy and impact of government initiatives. The city of Lansing, Michigan, has redefined the way it communicates with citizens. It makes a focused effort to be clear about the stage of the initiative, presents information in a way people can relate to and understand how it impacts them, and seeks constant interaction with communities.
  4. Engineering: The use of science and technology to deal with issues and enhance impact in creative ways is at the core of innovative government’s DNA. The city of New Rochelle in New York is incorporating virtual reality technology to clearly present plans for new buildings and public spaces to residents, so they can perceive more realistically how new projects will affect their lives.
  5. Ensembles: Since no single organisation has all the solutions, innovative city governments need to be able to bring different perspectives to define and solve problems in new ways. This is what Louisville, Kentucky, did through the “cradle to career” initiative it created to improve educational outcomes in a joint effort with all the main actors in the city, in a collaborative and enduring process.

Despite the shifting focus from innovations to the process of innovating and now to becoming innovative organisations, there is still little guidance on how to build successful innovative governments.

The examples of the five Es can serve as an illustration and help organisations, small and large cities alike, map out their capabilities to identify strengths and areas for improvement.

While the initial push for government innovation in the 1980s coincided with a common vision of government as “the problem”, it is encouraging to see that today more people realise our biggest challenges will not be solved without shifting the culture of how we think, creating a climate of questioning the status quo, planting innovative DNA within city hall and nurturing innovators throughout the entire enterprise.

— Jorrit de Jong, Fernando Monge and Adam Hawksbee

Picture credit: Kendall Ruth on Unsplash