America’s most important innovation happens in City Hall

On a quiet morning in Port St. Lucie, Florida, Chief Innovation Officer Kate Parmelee started digging into data from the city’s annual Citizen Summit in 2023 and saw trouble in green and grey. 

Residents were asking the city to increase access to nature preserves and parks. More than 50,000 new residents had arrived since 2020, making it one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities. Open land was vanishing — replaced by rooftops, roads and rising pressure on the natural spaces that defined the community.

Parmelee assumed the answer was simple: build more parks. But then she did what too few public officials do — she asked residents what they actually wanted. 

From the Citizen Summit to conversations with Boy Scouts, environmental advocates, walking groups and skeptics alike, her team listened. What they heard upended their assumptions. Residents didn’t just want new parks. They wanted natural spaces protected and to connect with nature and each other. Nature wasn’t decoration; it was identity. And it was slipping away.

Over the next two years, Mayor Shannon Martin, the city council and Parmelee’s team turned that sentiment into civic action. Port St. Lucie launched a resident-driven conservation program — creating a green land bank, preserving over 5,000 acres and expanding more than 20 miles of trails. Residents aren’t just using these spaces, they’re helping steward them.

In city halls across the country, a quiet transformation is underway. Parmelee and thousands like her are proving that entrepreneurial, people-centered government is possible, and it couldn’t come at a more important time. Americans are used to describing the public sector as siloed, rigid, bureaucratic and unresponsive, and their trust in government has declined rapidly over the past two decades.

Cities remain a crucial bright spot. City-level innovators are starting a new era of leadership — part strategist, part catalyst, part designer and part bridge-builder. And if we’re going to build on what is already working in government, it’s important to understand who these leaders are and how they work differently. 

By most accounts, the first wave of public-sector innovation leaders emerged between 2009 and 2011 — including offices and roles dedicated to innovation at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State of Maryland, and the launch of local innovation departments in Helsinki, Paris, Boston, New York and others. They signaled a new posture inside government: some were outsiders hired to jolt the system; others were entrepreneurial insiders with a fresh mandate. All experimented with ideas gaining traction outside government and tested which could work within it. 

Fifteen years later, thousands of innovation professionals now work in municipal, state and national governments. What began as experimentation is now a field with shared tools, evidence and a global learning community. City leaders increasingly realize the value of public innovation and have a clearer understanding of what it takes to assess problems and unearth insights that improve residents’ lives, and can do so in repeatable, precise ways.

The Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation, the organization that I lead, emerged in 2021 with the goal of providing this field the infrastructure it lacked. We support the Public Innovators Network, which now includes more than 2,000 innovation leads, innovation team directors, civic designers and other municipal problem-solvers, who are now building a growing body of achievements — demonstrating how public innovation can make an impact. 

Baltimore’s Chief Innovation Officer Terrance Smith believes that innovation leaders must be listeners and observers first, developers and builders second. Over the last few years, his team has applied that mindset to Baltimore’s shortfall of 900 police officers. Instead of spending more money on a bigger recruiting budget, they showed that police hiring was slowed by breakdowns in the process, not a lack of applicants. 

Fixing those issues — which included helping applicants who needed support in securing drivers’ licenses — contributed to 47% more new officers being hired. Their use of data and collaboration across agencies helped the city shift resources, save money and strengthen and sustain the pipeline.

Kristie Chin, i-Team director for Philadelphia, launched a project focused on the intersection of home repair, workforce development and vacant lot revitalization. They turned a big vision into block-level action that residents could see, touch and feel. As she puts it, “Energy efficiency doesn’t resonate with residents. But saving money on utility bills does.” Drawing on thousands of insights from earlier public-sector innovators, her team learned that success depends on making the work concrete and immediately meaningful to the community.

Stories like these show the field of public innovation maturing fast. Now, with years of evidence at our fingertips, there are clear tactics that consistently lead to better outcomes for cities. City leaders now have access to playbooks, toolkits and trainings to help innovation practitioners engage communities in design, calculate and mitigate risk, develop and deploy prototypes and create significant impact for residents. 

At BCPI, we also connect city leaders to experts — many former city leaders themselves — who can equip governments with the skills and methods needed to deliver more value with the resources they already have. 

The public sector is facing a legitimacy cliff. In an era of shrinking budgets and rising expectations, city practitioners are doing what those in other levels of government increasingly cannot: listening, adapting and delivering. 

This is the moment for more municipalities to think differently — so they can hold the trust line and continue to show government that works.

Francisca M. Rojas is the executive director of the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University.