Mayor’s Open Innovation Partnership (Academic Institutions)

Partnership System Design | Work-in-progress Framework Development for the Mayor’s Office of City of Boston (2020)

As the home of over 50 institutions of higher education, the training ground of future leaders of communities, industries, and governments, the Greater Boston Area arguably has the highest concentration of R&D and innovation capacities in the world. As the region faces growing economic, social, and environmental changes that are challenging the traditional speed of innovation in public services, how might the City of Boston harness its available wealth of young talents and academic resources to help local communities prosper in a sustainable and equitable way?  

KEY PRINCIPLES

In designing the framework for academic partnerships between the City and its neighboring institutions, we identified three key guiding principles to serve as reminders to the team, as it ventures into a new fuzzy territory where the very diversity of disciplines and stakeholders itself may become a cause of decision paralysis or entanglement. 

• Co-creation: ensure balanced, continuous, and complementary involvement from universities, community colleges, and city stakeholders (all skins in the game) to maximize the sense of mutual learning, responsibility, and collective ownership for each project.

• Execution-focused: directly align with the professors’ and students’ research interests  (e.g. thesis work) while minimizing the exposure to academia’s institutional and financial overheads.

• Continuity: establish ready-mechanisms (e.g. reserved follow-up funds, residency programs) for good teams to advance their projects into an implementable state.

COLLABORATION EXAMPLE

For a challenge that is “integrated, system-scale” and due to some “capability gap”--proposed to be addressed through the “joint practicum” track (see Figure 2 attachment)

Under the umbrella of the “Land Use & Planning” category in Imagine 2030, there are at least 11 initiatives that can benefit from a substantial level of public engagement, and at least 8 initiatives from the adoption of new data representation and interface designed to enhance the accessibility of data and participatory decision-making, while at least 7 initiatives require the support of policy-making and coordination from the City Hall (see Figure 1). As land-use policies, including those for streets and sidewalks, can be considered the DNA of a city that greatly influence how it responds to social, economic, and environmental changes, it is necessary to ensure that these policies, while coordinating with investments, reflect the needs and aspirations of low and middle-income residents, retirees, public service workers, seniors, and young families. Building such a deliberate process requires not just having boots on the ground, but also new tools. Under our draft framework for partnership, land-use development would fall under the categories of “integrated, system-scale” and “capability-gap” challenges. This would be best addressed by student group efforts guided by professors and city department mentors. An example of a suitable collaboration is a partnership with MIT and Bunker Hill through a year-long practicum.

The Department of Urban Studies & Planning (DUSP) and the City Science research group of MIT Media Lab have track records in building, testing, and deploying public-ready, participatory urban decision-making platforms in collaboration with local high schoolers, grassroot organizations, and city governments (BRT community meeting with the Barr Foundation and Nuestra Comunidad in 2015; refugee housing allocation with Hamburg City in 2016). While the team from MIT can lead the development of new data visualization techniques, interfaces, analytic modules, and the simulation of hypothetical scenarios (e.g. flexible, responsive zoning), the team from Bunker Hill can lead the design of  tools and engagement methodologies. Collectively, they can explore ways to synthesize quantitative and qualitative data into meaningful measures of urban livelihood (e.g. accessibility, mixed-use score, perception of comfort/safety, etc.). These complementary efforts ensure that the resulting engagement process would enable citizens with different levels of data literacy and knowledge in urban policies to comfortably and productively contribute to discussions. 

As mapped out in the draft framework, the outreach to internal stakeholders (BPDA, Streets, OED, DND, DoIT and ONS) and external partners (Dr. Jim Cannif, BunkerHill; Prof. Chris Zegras, MIT) would begin at the earliest “align”, stage, followed by a series of “pre-launch” tasks (e.g. fundraising, guidelines development), then to launching three parallel tracks to facilitate projects of different nature:

• Integrated, System-scale Challenges → Joint Practicum 

• Capability-gap Challenges → Joint Practicum or Hackathon

• Creative Challenges → Thesis Mentoring or Hackathon

Finally, through the continuous participation of city department mentors in projects, the City will be in an informed position to offer follow-up support (e.g. residency), consolidate efforts, and prepare for potential implementations.