Not ‘What’, But ‘How’

This is a report about urban innovation: the ongoing, evolutionary journey of trying new things to improve your city.

Innovation is something that we know is happening in places of every imaginable size and in all corners of the world. We see the products of this innovation everyday, but what we don’t know a lot about is how innovation is being approached in different places.

To answer this question, we surveyed 581 local and regional public sector representatives from all over the United States and Canada about their approach to innovation. The following report, ‘Not What, But How: Understanding the Urban Innovation Cycle’ integrates a sample of this survey data into a ‘question and answer’ format which provides a glimpse into the inner workings of urban innovation: how others are approaching common challenges, defining success, discovering new ideas, piloting solutions, and sharing results.

On Thursday, March 5th, 2020, we hosted a webinar which takes a deeper dive into the survey themes and data, and will shine a spotlight on how a number of cities are approaching common challenges, defining success, discovering new ideas, piloting solutions, and sharing results.

Together with our partners, UrbanLeap and CivicPulse, we want to thank everyone who took the time to help us with our report. For additional survey response data, please write to contact@newcities.org.

Featured photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash.