By Eliza Pollack, Program Manager for Innovation Management, Office of Innovation and Technology

Our Start

One of the challenges of being an innovation team is never settling for the status quo. If our programs get stagnant, or stop growing, or cease to challenge our co-workers to think about their work in new ways, we lose a little bit of our street cred and it becomes that much harder to convince people that innovation is necessary in the context of municipal government. When the innovation portfolio was created four years ago, the themes of People, Place and Process coincided with the Innovation Academy, the Innovation Lab and the Innovation Fund; since then, each piece has expanded to more cohesively and intentionally support the growing interest of City departments to learn how to apply innovation principles to their real-work challenges.

The Newest Pillar

Innovation Consulting is the new fourth pillar of our portfolio, and encompasses a series of programs that aim to help explain exactly what we do within the context of municipal government, how some of our strategies and techniques can be applied to a variety of professional environments and challenges, and why it’s important that innovation – whatever that means – be strategically and intentionally incorporated into peoples’ everyday (or at least every month) work. The core service involves planning targeting workshops for teams facing specific challenges: think “soft” skills, like wanting to improve communication among colleagues, or more concrete issues, like process improvement or program evaluation. In collaboration with Innovation Mentors from our Network – folks who have graduated from the Innovation Academy and continue to have a vested interest in this work – we create specific sessions using human-centered design thinking tools and techniques to help the “client” think differently about the task at hand. Through these workshops, Public Property improved their sense of internal cohesiveness and collaboration; Animal Care & Control clarified employee roles and streamlined internal messaging; and the Free Library designed new strategies to attract millennials and young families.

Consulting has manifested itself in less structured ways, as well. We leveraged the expertise of Innovation Mentors to manage the City’s internal solicitation and evaluation process for the Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge grant; we’ve provided feedback to employees looking to launch pilot programs and new initiatives; and we facilitated a series of “non-traditional” focus groups aimed at engaging diverse stakeholders in important City-wide branding conversations.

Each of these instances is important on its own, but taken together, these all indicate an exciting shift in government, one that proves Philadelphia is embracing innovation and creativity in intentional and comprehensive ways. With the recent launch of the fifth cohort of the Innovation Academy, we have a robust Innovation Network that encompasses over 100 employees representing almost every City department, and our capacity to affect change is truly greater than ever.