Instead, we need rapid and radical action, with a particular focus on inducing positive social tipping points. From this standpoint, it’s right that Europe’s cities, with their large economic and environmental footprints, forward-looking populations, and relatively agile, networked governments, should take a lead.

With a more proactive, shaping role for governments back on the agenda, fundamental questions of how the public sector works and solves problems have naturally re-emerged. Government innovation – the processes through which public administrations create new strategies, policies and services – represents a central field of inquiry. Whether requiring new cultures of innovation, leveraging digitalisation or co-creation approaches with citizens and the private sector, government innovation is about balancing risk taking, continuity, and responsible budgeting with the flexibility needed for experimentation and creative solutions.

For city governments, this type of innovation is mostly about empowering administrations, sharing risks and building the capacity to address critical local challenges while effectively responding to residents’ needs. Three bundles of fundamental city challenges usually serve as a point of departure, once again confirmed in the Eurocities Pulse Mayors Survey. First, complex, society-wide challenges dominated by climate change but also involving social inequalities and economic performance. Second, domain specific challenges related to housing, mobility, energy and planning. Third, more internal governance challenges that might include budgets, financing and administrative capacities.
Government innovation by city halls can play a major role across any of these challenges and priorities. It is encouraging that close to 90% of cities in the Eurocities Pulse Mayors Survey believe that they have the capacity to innovate, tackle challenges and deliver on policy priorities. Above all, European cities consider innovation to be particularly important for addressing complex challenges through transformative agendas and the anticipation of future challenges. The Future Mentors programme follows this sentiment in an unusual way. Initiated by the City of Espoo for Eurocities and facilitated by the OECD, it reverses traditional mentorship and establishes a small group of young people mentoring a city decision-maker and has so far engaged 26 cities.

Additional opportunities cut across citizen engagement, accessing new revenues, developing new procedures, and improving outcomes for residents. The most easily identifiable innovation activities relate to data and evidence-based policy as well as data analytics. New digitally enabled services and solutions alongside human-centred design for public services are a second group, followed by more technical activities such as finance, procurement and foresight support. Examples include Tirana’s Open Data Portal and One-Stop-Shop of online services or London’s online community, Talk London, which engages citizens in discussions of some of the most pressing challenges and priorities facing the city.

Our forthcoming joint survey of 61 cities across Europe reveals further details on actual innovation practice, and by extension, where opportunities for targeted capacity building and training may be particularly helpful. This includes practices focusing on e-government, climate action, economic development and transport. For example, the City of Turku established a deliberative citizens’ panel with over 170 randomly selected participants to inform transport developments for its city centre. This approach is built on experiences with citizens’ assemblies which have become common for climate action (e.g. Bologna’s climate assembly), as well as for innovating strategic planning (e.g. Leuven 2020). Such approaches may also require novel city institutions. The Cluj Centre for Innovation and Civic Imagination is establishing new forms of collaboration with its residents including a youth advisory council.

Beyond these substantive issues, building capacities linked to crosscutting, whole-of-government approaches; anticipating and managing future challenges; engaging and collaborating with diverse stakeholders; and improving service delivery emerge as priorities. However, any support programmes would have to centrally acknowledge the diversity of European cities and their variable levels of experience in public sector innovation.

What the forthcoming Eurocities Pulse/LSE Cities survey on government innovation once again confirms is a considerable potential for closing the opportunity-practice gap of government innovation. The opportunity cuts across better data and data analytics for decision making, more effective public engagement and service improvements. Related practice will range from AI trials considering privacy, transparency and other risks to people-focused innovation of governance, management and local democracy. Any of this will require informed, confident, and willing leadership which should not be taken for granted. Instead, proactive leadership training, coaching and technical assistance is urgently needed.

To get there, universities will need to better combine their role as ‘anchor institutions’, with large workforces, land holdings and purchasing power, and knowledge bases by fully engaging with the urban government innovation cycle.