Innovation in City Hall

Innovations are key to solving the challenges cities face. But even the best innovation will not change the public sector overnight. Jorrit de Jong draws on his work at the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative exploring how understanding the structural building blocks of innovative organisations can help cities and their leaders perform better.

Using examples from a range of different cities, de Jong will discuss the “Five Es” of innovative organisations – evidence, empathy, engagement, engineering and ensembles – ingrained in the DNA of successful urban problem-solvers in city halls. He argues that to continue improving we need to shift the culture of how we think, and create a climate of questioning the status quo, planting innovative DNA within city halls and nurturing innovators throughout the entire enterprise.

Speaker: Jorrit de Jong, Director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University

Chair: Ricky Burdett, Professor of Urban Studies and Director of LSE Cities at the London School of Economics and Political Science