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.