If you are interested in your city becoming an "Innovative City" join us on a call for one of our informational sessions or trainings. The Innovative Cities team will describe what it takes to list your city on the IC Web site, and the key role of City Champions. Connect with other City Champions and learn how to engage local resources as you build your city's social innovation ecosystem.

Reserving a space for the next one: Email us your RSVP or call 503.452.6898.

Innovative Cities is a new tool to increase the pool of actors involved in promoting social innovation within cities of all sizes. It describes the critical role of people (i.e. lawyers, journalists, funders) and organizations (media, foundations, schools) who control needed expertise or resources essential to social enterprise, and offers examples for how to increase the quality of and access to these resources. Innovative Cities seeks to improve the municipal ecosystem that innovators need to be efficient and effective.

It is essential for success that communities recognize and nurture innovators at all levels. We have proposed an 8-point model for cities that wish to support change leaders in their communities. It will provide a model for other cities to replicate, and a format to follow. Hosted online, successful cities will be able to share strategies and resources with other cities. This includes a new kind of center for innovation incubation, under development, in Portland.

Innovative Cities: Eight Elements for Building the Ecosystem for Thriving Social and Environmental Innovation

1. Engage more citizens in change
   Citizens want to be involved, lead change, and see evidence of improvement. More individuals are stepping up and offering to do something—but few pathways exist for them to learn, receive full support, and ensure success. And, we need all good ideas.
2. Foster a new breed of change organization
   The traditional charity-driven model of nonprofits reduces collaboration and increases competition for scarce funding. Nonprofits can spend up to 70% of their time feeding their organizations, decreasing their ability to be effective change organizations. The model is outdated, undervalued, and yet we need change now more than ever. We need new examples and strategies.  

"Today's problems cannot be solved if we still think the way we thought when we created them." -Albert Einstein

We have outlined eight elements that comprise an ideal city-wide framework.  

1. Communication
   The Communication category includes information for, as well as information about, social innovators. Citizens need access to key information in order to better understand, support, and get involved with social innovation; while the social innovators themselves require access to available resources in order to maximize their impact. Stories of success, information, and news about social innovation, as well as frequency of the communication flow, are critical to ensuring that social innovation remains within the public dialogue. In an innovative city, social innovation is discussed in publications and media with wide distribution.
   
   
2. Convening
   The Convening category of the Innovative Cities framework describes the opportunities for social innovators to connect with each other to build relationships and learn. Bringing together and convening social entrepreneurs, citizens, and experts around events with the primary objectives of learning and interacting builds an ecosystem that is ready to support innovation, new ideas, and improves practice. Regular convenings elevate public awareness of social innovation and provide tangible substantial opportunities to develop new approaches or and collaborative partnerships that will help to sustain social innovation in the community with tangible results.
   
   
3. Educational Programs
   In order to nurture a new generation of social innovators, as well as share promising practice with current leaders, an innovative city will offer educational programs in how to launch and grow effective social ventures. An educational program has sequenced curriculum and related learning goals. Programs are offered in both traditional and informal settings, based in universities and community agencies. They are accessible to a wide audience through specific programming and outreach targeting youth, underrepresented populations, those in the second half of life, among others, inviting a diverse set of voices to become leaders of change.
   
   
4. Engagament Pathways
   Engagement pathways within an innovative city provide entry points for people to learn about and gain experience with change organizations such as nonprofits or social businesses. These pathways serve as open invitations to community members of all ages to not only volunteer, but to mentor, intern, shadow, develop programs, consult, or lead projects. These kinds of opportunities are open to the community on an ongoing basis, offering flexible and creative ways to choose or create unique paths to deeper involvement with change leadership.  
   
   
5. Financial Access
   The Financial Access category focuses on improving access to financial resources of all kinds for social change. Social innovators need capital for non-traditional enterprises, social businesses, and new nonprofits as well as new initiatives and program replication within existing institutions. With more accessible start-up and sustaining capital, social innovators and entrepreneurs have increased capacity to be effective. Greater flow of capital through creative and non-traditional means also opens opportunities to more citizens to engage with and develop innovative social enterprises, increasing a community’s capacity to solve problems.
   
   
6. Networks and Member Organizations
   Innovative cities promote connections between social innovators through networks and member organizations. Networks enable people and organizations to meet and stay connected around shared interests; member organizations, like professional organizations, are focused on a topic or discipline, and build resources and share collective knowledge with its members. Citizens and organizations need opportunities to increase connectivity around the topic of social innovation. Coalitions, affiliations, and cooperations also offer a variety of platforms for idea exchange, continued education, and network development. 
   
   
7. Physical Space
   Physical spaces are places where people can come together to model, nurture, host, and launch social innovation. They include buildings, multi-use rooms, flex spaces, or other reliably available places. Communities need to provide physical spaces where early launchers, leaders of traditional nonprofits, and innovators can learn and collaborate. Physical space that incubates innovation embodies new thinking, new systems, tools, programs and relationships within and around itself. Places that foster innovation need to be readily and consistently available, accessible, and provide a rich set of resources, programs and support. 
   
   
8. Professional Support
   In general, the Professional Support category includes the kinds of administrative, legal, operational, and marketing expenses fundamental to the successful operation of any enterprise. It includes the professional services that form the essential infrastructure required by social enterprise, such as bookkeeping, accounting, and banking, along with services such as Web design, engineering, or printing. An innovative city includes professionals who value change organizations, and, as a result, identify creative ways to lower barriers to needed services, making them affordable, accessible and up-to-date to meet the changing needs of social innovators.