I have been asked by Living Cities to participate in an upcoming Economic Development Roundtable to take place in Detroit on March 5^th.  They asked each of the participants to provide an answer to the following question:

Given your experience, what are the most ‘game-changing’ ways to use a significant amount of grant funding ($100 million+) to change the trajectory of an urban economy?  In other words, if you were given a free hand to use $100+ million of grants, what would you do?

Here is my answer.  I suggest that we turn cities in to innovation hotspots.  It should be an interesting conversation.  What would you do with the money?

We need a new national economic development conversation.  It should bubble up from cities. We are playing defense based on old industrial economy rules and systems.  We must play offense to create a 21^st century innovation economy that all citizens can fully participate in.  An innovation economy will provide citizens with a viable job ladder and good higher wage job opportunities.  It will also enable solutions for the big system challenges we face including health care, education, workforce development, and energy sustainability.  These are system challenges that will not be fixed with incremental tweaks.  We must design, demonstrate, and deploy new system approaches to these challenges.  The solutions should be coming from our cities.  Cities should be living labs.  If cities become innovation hot spots new investment and jobs will be created.  We need ongoing R&D for new transformative models and systems.  Developing a 21^st century innovation economy depends on it.

The good news is that given the scope of economic challenges our cities face there is more receptivity to innovation than ever.  The bad news is that we have turned innovation in to a buzzword.  Every one and every thing is an innovation and of course when that happens no one and nothing is.  We have to get below the buzzwords.  Cities offer a perfect nexus and can catalyze economic transformation. Cities are comprised of emergent networks with the assets necessary to become innovation hotspots.  We should help turn a targeted group of cities in to innovation hotspots to serve as national and global models for economic transformation.  They can demonstrate to the nation and to the world that all citizens can participate in an innovation economy and become active R&D labs for solution development on the big system challenges of our day.

If I could deploy $100 million (not nearly enough but a good start) I would launch Cities As Innovation Hotspots.  Cities would compete to be one of four selected to become partners in a national program to create replicable models and tools to strengthen the innovation capacity of our nation’s urban centers and actionable platforms for ongoing system solution development in areas of high social importance and impact.  Too much of our current effort is incremental and fragmented.  Too much government and foundation investment is spread thin among the usual suspects and going toward point solutions that will only serve to sustain our current systems.  We are not investing in platforms that can make necessary disruptive change better understood and safer to scale.  Sustaining investments would be fine if the current systems we live and operate in could be improved to transform our economy and social systems.  It is not possible.  We need to learn how to design and explore new systems while pedaling the bicycle of our current systems.  We need safe and manageable environments to experiment at the systems level.  Let’s identify a small number of cities with the necessary public and private sector leadership, institutional capacity for change, and a motivated community to make the local commitment necessary to serve as national examples for the required transformation.

We don’t have to invent anything new to transform our economic, health care, education, and energy systems.  It is not technology that is getting in our way. We have more technology available to us today than we know how to absorb and put to work.  It is humans and the organizations we live in that are both stubbornly resistant to change.  The silos and systems we are stuck in have evolved over a long period of time.  They are well intentioned but not capable of disrupting themselves to take advantage of new technologies to enable new solutions and better value for citizens, students, and patients.  We need new systems and a path to demonstrate that new models and approaches work in the real world and can scale.  We have to create the environment and platforms that can enable systems level experimentation and change.

Cities As Innovation Hot Spots would be a catalyst for change and a real world lab to advance system solutions across the country.  Four cities would be selected and connected in a national network to leverage a common framework for measuring and increasing innovation capacity.  Each city would share a common framework for defining economic development objectives and measuring progress. Each city would target specific focus areas (health care, education, energy, transportation, housing, workforce development etc) for system design and experimentation in the real world lab of their city.  An Innovation Story Studio would be shared across the target cities to package and share the stories of progress in order to create an emotional connection and strong grass roots engagement both within and across target cities.

Time to start playing offense.  Let’s get below the buzzwords of innovation and turn our cities into innovation hotspots. Lots of details to work out.  Let’s work them out together.  Our citizens are waiting.