How to support community innovation through bridging across sector
At a time when we are hearing, seeing and feeling the impact of community-driven innovation, we asked Amalia Zepou, Bloomberg Fellow in Government Innovation at LSE Cities, and Hamdan Abdul Majeed, Managing Director of Think City: How can we better support community-driven innovation? They explored what kind of systems and structures we can put in place to increase impact without losing its value to our cities and how we can take a cross-sector approach, bridging local community, governments and the private sector.
Key takeaways:
The value of trust is key when it comes to working across sectors and supporting community innovation. Trust has become a buzzword that people talk about but more and more, we are losing trust in our institutions and communities. We need to nurture environments of social trust which inspire new ideas for cities.
New skills are emerging because of the new ways people interact with their places. With so many crises happening around the world, driving through chaos will be a skillset that people will need to develop to be able to succeed in community-led innovations. As well as this, what society wants from the city and how people participate in their cities is changing. Cities need to respond and adapt to the higher demand for citizen participation because of digital media.
Governments don’t speak in languages that everyone can understand and participate, which often leads to people being left out or getting their information from unreliable sources. Creativity and art are essential when bringing people together in cities and the value of that cannot be lost especially in a time where the economy focuses on materialism and consumer demands. Music and art are creative languages that expand participation.