Why Every Local Government Needs a New Operating System
Technological innovation on a piece-by-piece basis isn't enough. More fundamental change is needed.
Neil Kleiman is a clinical professor at New York University with a joint appointment at the Wagner School of Public Service and the Center for Urban Science + Progress. He is also director of policy and evaluation for the National Resource Network and is the co-author, with Stephen Goldsmith, of the 2017 book A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative and Distributed Governance.
Before joining NYU, Kleiman was director of policy at Living Cities, a collaborative of the world's largest foundations and corporate philanthropies. In 2008, in partnership with the Harvard Kennedy School, he helped create the Project on Municipal Innovation, the only forum in the U.S. where mayoral advisers meet to learn about and design new policy ideas. He began his career as the founding director of the Center for an Urban Future, a New York-based policy think tank.
In addition to teaching at NYU, Kleiman has taught urban policy at Barnard College, John Jay College of the City University of New York, Tulane University and Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, and has been a visiting fellow at Williams College. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Technological innovation on a piece-by-piece basis isn't enough. More fundamental change is needed.
Voices of the GOVERNING Institute
The new National Resource Network aims to help local governments find the experts and information they need.
From brainstorming to "ideation" to troubleshooting, a city's Innovation Delivery Team has to cover a lot of ground--and do it quickly.
The people staffing five cities' Innovation Delivery Teams aren't necessarily experts in the subjects the cities are working on. They are focused more on the "how" than on the "what."
It means looking in four directions for creative solutions to pressing problems. Innovation delivery teams in several cities are pioneering the process.
Aiming to get people into the innovative mindset for improving services and saving money, cities are turning to competitions.
The Tennessee city’s Innovation Delivery Team launched a collaborative effort to generate and implement ideas to spark commerce in struggling neighborhoods.
Backed by $24 million in foundation funds, five cities are creating dedicated teams in their mayors’ offices to look for ways to fundamentally restructure how the cities do what they do. There is much to be learned from this ambitious effort.