The Challenge

Community Innovation

Cities, companies, and people all over the world are all trying to find sustainable, scalable, and impactful growth-oriented solutions to economic and community challenges. These challenges range from diversity and inclusion to workforce development, corporate collaboration, and more. Each challenge hindering communities from reaching their full potential.

What would it look like if we used this one-in-a-century opportunity to rethink and reinvent how we live, work, and play in our communities? What if collaborative community networks could serve as design laboratories for transformative solutions, partnerships, and virtuous hubs for social and economic innovation? What opportunities do we miss when we leave the application of community problem-solving efforts to chance? What jobs do we fail to create? How many people do we fail to elevate from poverty or children we fail to educate adequately? How many companies do we fail to save? The kind of transformative economic ideas that work doesn't usually come from top-down planning in remote think tanks; they come from the bottom-up through meaningful conversations, collaboration, and involvement of all key stakeholders.

If you’ve ever wanted a researched based and human-centered guide to building a more resilient, connected, and prosperous community, here you have it.

If you care about your world start with your city.

The Community Innovation Model offers a new theory of change for addressing community problem-solving challenges to generate catalytic collaborations, ideas, and conversations that support more competitive and resilient communities. Instead of focusing on top-down approaches to drive change, it looks holistically at the community, with people at the center. It aims to improve community vitality, foster mindset shifts, and community or organizational behaviors which lead to improved performance. It argues community innovation can create a virtuous cycle by making complex problem-solving part of a community’s DNA. It explores the characteristics that drive and improve community performance and suggests a process for implementing such change. Finally, it offers tools to help practitioners, community-minded residents, and companies better understand community challenges, uncover community blind spots and recognize the inherent qualities and innovation capacity of the community. In addition, the Community Innovation Model considers “The 10 Characteristics of Highly Effective Cities.” Communities that seize on these characteristics separate themselves from the rest, leading to high performance and trends in the direction of the community’s ultimate goals. Emphasis on these characteristics encourages communities to view themselves as systems working collaboratively toward mutually agreed objectives.

Why Communities Need Innovation:

• Building a resilient, responsible, healthy and scalable City, Company or Cohort is a science.

• Any City, Company or Cohort that can adapt and move faster than the competition has an enormous competitive advantage.

• To scale successfully, an organization needs to systematically align its organizational fabric to the community and ecosystem in which it resides.

• To grow successfully cities and communities need to coordinate their programmatic design to the needs of its, companies, workforce and citizens.