Innovators Crisscross the U.S. in Eight Week Sprint

Originally posted on www.bloomberg.org. 

2,000 hours of skills-building workshops, delivered to more than 3,000 municipal leaders in 300 cities across 45 states. All in eight short summer weeks.

Welcome to the first phase of the 2017 Mayors Challenge, Bloomberg Philanthropies’ flagship effort to encourage cities to generate bold responses to the urgent challenges they face.

Starting this week, Bloomberg Philanthropies and its network of innovation experts are crisscrossing the country to work with city leaders and their teams. The plan? Provide guidance on developing a bold idea for the Mayors Challenge, while also giving municipal officials cutting-edge tools to identify and tackle daunting challenges – so they can invest in innovation long after the Mayors Challenge ends.

As I’ve said before, cities are a powerful, though largely untapped, distribution network for ideas that work. The Mayors Challenge is designed to harness and strengthen that network because it focuses on helping cities develop ideas that can spread. And these daylong workshops are a powerful way to jumpstart that process. They will deliver the latest thinking on how to gain a deep understanding of whatever problem the city wants to address, harness insights from the people who experience that issue first-hand, and engage stakeholders in the idea creation process from start to finish.

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