How can cities spark innovation? — by Aparna Ramanan
By | 2024
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, «innovate» means «to introduce changes and new ideas.» When we talk about how cities are governed and their challenges addressed, how can we ensure that these transformations and ideas translate into an improved quality of life for citizens?
To explore this topic, we speak with Aparna Ramanan, Senior Program Manager for Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Government Innovation program. We discuss with her the key aspects for sparking innovation in cities, as well as the 2025 edition of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge—a global competition that calls on cities with 100,000 residents or more to collaborate with citizens and entrepreneurs to radically reimagine their most essential municipal services.
#ExpertVoices | 2024 x E07
Sparking innovation in cities
— by Aparna Ramanan —
What are the key factors for sparking innovation in cities?
There are three things that really help drive innovation in cities. The first one is that the mayor or the city’s chief executive has to be willing to have vision and leadership to really drive innovation forward. Nothing can really happen unless you have that leadership at the top. The second thing is, you have to have a city hall and city government that are interested in making innovation part of the day-to-day business of the city. Too often we hear that innovation is an entrepreneur’s job, a startup’s job, or it’s the private sector’s job. But in fact, innovation is the process by which we make government better on a day-to-day basis. And you have to be willing to make that change. Third and finally, deep and meaningful resident engagement. If a city hall or a mayor’s office is talking to the residents and understanding what their points of view are or how they’re experiencing city services, innovation will absolutely get better.
What is the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayor’s Challenge, and what impact is the 2025 edition expected to have?
We launched the Mayor’s Challenge for the first time ever over a decade ago. It was launched with the vision of supporting mayors in doing bold and ambitious solutions to the most pressing problems their residents face.
And now, over 10 years later, we are super excited to be launching the 2025 Mayors Challenge. It’s going to be global and open to all cities with more than 100,000 residents. It calls on city governments to innovate and transform a core city service. Public transportation, education, clean water, air, sanitation, emergency response, internet connectivity, utilities, energy, power… We are asking city halls and mayors, or city’s chief executives, to come up with a transformative approach to a core city service.
We’re hoping to see hundreds of absolutely brilliant and transformational ideas, and that it becomes very difficult for our advisory committee and our expert readers to actually be able to select 50 finalists from this group of cities from around the world. And then, we’re hoping that we end up with 25 winners who have ideas that can genuinely transform the way that cities deliver services to their residents. And that the ones that are really transformative can be taken and shared with cities around the world.
Visit mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org to learn more about the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge
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Interview and edition by Sergio García i Rodríguez,
Head of Communication at Anteverti & CitiesToBe Executive Editor, and Martina Jané i Curtu, Comms specialist at Anteverti.
Video by Cristóbal Sarría Chitty and Alexis Rivas
About the authors
Aparna Ramanan is a Senior Program Manager for Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Government Innovation program. At Bloomberg Philanthropies, she helps to lead the organization’s Mayors Challenge—a global competition designed to spur and spread government innovation that improves lives in cities around the world. Prior to Bloomberg Philanthropies, Aparna spent more than a decade working with public sector organizations at the local, state, and federal level to bolster their technical capacity to deliver more effective outcomes for communities and advise social entrepreneurship startups in emerging markets. Aparna holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Tufts University. You can follow Aparna on LinkedIn (@Aparna Ramanan).
