Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have released the report ‘Enhancing Innovation Capacity in City Government’ which covers the results of their survey that examined the innovation capacity of 89 cities across the globe.
Innovation capacity is defined as the human, financial, and institutional resources and skills that can catalyze, implement, and advance collaborative, long-term, and bottom-up problem solving. The capacity of city governments to innovate is based on three interdependent building blocks: organizational arrangements – referring to the formal and informal institutional structures that can foster or hinder innovation; data management capability – related to a city’s ability to harness, manage, and use data effectively, and the openness to partnership – the ability for the city to work with different stakeholders.
The survey covered five dimensions of innovation capacity:
- innovation strategy and approaches – a dedicated strategy encourages cities to stimulate their long-term capacity to innovate by publicly stating those goals so that the city can be held accountable to achieving them;
- staffing and structure of innovation work – the cities surveyed ranked leadership commitment as the most important determinant of successful innovation work;
- data used to support innovation work – the production, free flow, and utilization of data and knowledge across the public sector is required to improve innovation capacity;
- funding dedicated to innovation – cities that set up a specific financing framework for innovation have a strong foundation for the implementation of new ideas; and,
- the outcomes monitored and evaluated based on the city’s objectives – Cities that evaluate the impact of their innovation work are better positioned to scale up innovative projects that offer a better return on investment of taxpayers’ dollars.
An interactive map has also been created to demonstrate cities’ commitments to innovation and how they affect citizens’ lives.