A Mutual Vision of Innovation for American Cities
Last month Kauffman Foundation released their latest entrepreneurial manifesto 'Start Us Up: America's New Business Plan' and this week Bloomberg Philanthropies in partnership with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released a research paper called 'Enhancing Innovation Capacity in City Government' -- and they have a lot in common. I highly recommend digging into both of them as they each corroborate the conclusions of the other. Here's a quick overview of the main commonalities:
- Local governments and municipalities need to state their innovation strategies and communicate that plan to their entire community.
- There should be a strategic leader, staff or organization assigned to executing on that plan.
- Cities should adopt open data policies and use the same data to identify problems and measure success.
- Innovation requires funding, whether it be from grants or streamlined access to capital for startups.
These can be further distilled in to 3 basic steps: 1) Buy In - the city and community need to be supportive of innovation as an economic development strategy. 2) Funding - the city needs to invest in innovation and/or remove obstacles to funding. 3) Accountability - you can't manage what you can't measure, and that requires data and the people who understand how to use those data.
The overlapping conclusions of these highly respected organizations are very encouraging to me as both an entrepreneur and as a person tasked with leading innovation in my own community. They validate not only the need for a startup ecosystem as part of a comprehensive innovation strategy, but also the need for dedicated staff to execute on that strategy. Some cities have a Chief Innovation Officer, or perhaps a data/information officer that this responsibility falls on, while some cities establish organizations to lead these efforts. This may be the most important piece of the formula -- and I think it can be likened as the 'glue' that a community needs to keep various stakeholders aligned in the interest of innovation and economic development.
For the City of Westminster, my organization MAGIC is that glue. We were established by the city to build a tech ecosystem upon their investment in a municipal gigabit fiber network (managed by Ting). That initial investment not only provided the catalyst for an innovation strategy, but it also future-proofed their infrastructure to support economic development down the road. Westminster is a great example of a city that is executing on the strategies that the Kauffman Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies have identified as key ingredients in the economic future success of our country.