Engaging Entrepreneurs to Solve Urban Problems
Source: Governing on April 7, 2016 | Stephen Goldsmith
Too often, innovative ideas in the public sector never see the light of day due to regulations and oversight designed for a different era. While procurement regulations are intended to ensure accountability and minimize risk, the process leaves little room for experimentation or creative engagement with entrepreneurs. Philadelphia's FastFWD initiative tackled these challenges directly by opening up new mechanisms for entrepreneurs to co-create solutions with the city.
FastFWD, an initiative of former mayor Michael Nutter's administration, was a winner of the 2012-2013 Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, a competition that encourages cities to generate innovative ideas that solve major problems and improve city life -- and have the potential to spread to other cities. FastFWD used a business accelerator to connect interested entrepreneurs with staff from eight city departments for collaborative thinking and development. The initiative resulted in nine pilot projects, and two full contracts, with positive public-safety impact.
With FastFWD's problem-based procurement model, the city chose public safety and community stability as focus areas and invited open solutions to those problems. The accelerator graduates took a wide variety of approaches, ranging from Textizen's text-messaging-based outreach tools to Edovo's work to provide tablet-based education opportunities to jail inmates. Textizen's pilot work with the Mayor's Office of Reintegration Services has improved re-entry meeting attendance by 40 percent. The Edovo pilot enabled more than 500 inmates to complete 2,100 online educational courses in the first year of its work with Philadelphia's Department of Corrections. Brian Hill, the CEO of Edovo, credits FastFWD with his company's success: "There is absolutely no question that our ability to pilot in Philadelphia allowed us to exist and succeed today."
As part of its overall procurement-reform effort, the city streamlined and codified its procurement process for pilot projects, shortening the amount of paperwork required for a typical RFP from 47 pages to 18. The city also plans to pilot an open online registry with which innovators and entrepreneurs can share both pilot ideas and successes from pilot projects. A partnership with CityMart, a Barcelona-based procurement company, will enable Philadelphia to continue its problem-based procurements, with five more planned in the coming year to address a range of important urban problems. The FastFWD procurement effort also inspired open-source improvements to Big Ideas, the website through which the city procures innovative IT projects.
Based on my observation of the project's development over the past two years, key themes for success emerge with broader applicability to other cities:
• Use risk-ready funding to lower barriers to entry for city experimentation. Because grant funding supported the pilots, the city was able to accept a much greater level of risk than it could have with budgeted department funds. The pilot funding allowed the FastFWD companies to demonstrate proof of concept; as a result, several of the pilots are going to full contract at department cost.