City Accelerator Guide for Embedding Innovation in Local Government

This guidebook is intended to give local leaders a practical, action-oriented framework for breakthrough innovation.

Across the country and the world, local governments are striving to break through obsolete ways of working to address the challenges of the 21st century, especially on issues facing low-income residents. Here in the United States, economic opportunity in cities remains elusive for many – a fact made all the more significant as the nation heads towards a future in which a majority of its residents are people of color. Around the world, cities are growing at astonishing rates, bringing with that growth new challenges in terms of environmental sustainability, economic opportunity and quality of life. In a time of such rapid change, local government leaders are eager to adapt how they do business in order to produce materially different results. This guide is intended to help them do just that.

The guide offers practical guidance to local government officials on how to build a durable culture and practice of innovation. It lays out nine “Imperatives” towards this end, with concrete action steps for each to help cities get started, along with illustrative case studies.

The guide is authored by Nigel Jacob, Urban Technologist-in-Residence at Living Cities and the co-founder and co-chair of the Office of New Urban Mechanics, Boston’s nationally recognized innovation team. It draws from Jacob’s experience in Boston, leading practices in cities around the United States and the world, and from the private sector.

The guide was developed as part of the City Accelerator, a $3 million program of Living Cities with the Citi Foundation to speed the spread of innovation with the potential to benefit low-income people in local governments.

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This document is free for commercial, civil, and private use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license
Published: January 12, 2015

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