The IPL newsletter: Volume 16, Issue 323

OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2015

OECD
The Digital Economy Outlook is a biennial series which examines and documents evolutions and emerging opportunities and challenges in the digital economy. It highlights how OECD countries and partner economies are taking advantage of ICTs and the Internet to meet their public policy objectives. It asks how OECD countries can maximize the potential of the digital economy as a driver for innovation and inclusive growth.

CITIE – City Initiatives for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship – A Resource for City Leadership

John Gibson, Matthew Robinson and Scott Cain
This report is an introduction to the CITIE framework, analysis and results for 2015. It complements the CITIE website, where more detail including full case studies and a diagnostic tool can be found.

Section one makes the case for innovation and entrepreneurship, and introduces our approach Innovative tech companies are attractive to cities. Not only do they produce the jobs of tomorrow, but they are increasingly perceived as a symbol of civic vitality. There is a growing feedback loop between entrepreneurship outside of the city hall, and innovative governance within them. As a result, a growing number of city governments are turning their attention to what they can do to grow this part of their economy. While city authorities can’t create tech communities or entrepreneurs, what they can do is optimize the policy levers that are within their control to design the best set of conditions for innovation to flourish. CITIE aims to help city leaders around the world understand how best to approach this. For this report the authors researched how 40 leading cities from around the world are supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. They tested against a series of metrics that collectively answer three questions: 1. How open is the city to new ideas and new businesses? 2. How does the city optimize its infrastructure for high-growth businesses? 3. How does the city build innovation into its own activities?

Section two provides detail on the nine policy roles that are at the heart of the analysis. The analysis revolves around nine policy roles that city governments can adopt to support innovation and entrepreneurship. The roles are Regulator, Advocate, Customer, Host, Investor, Connector, Strategist, Digital Governor and Datavore. They are designed to cover the full range of a city’s operations. For each of these roles, the report: • Sets out why it is important. • Identifies the specific actions we look for to indicate good practice. • Shows how each city performs. • Describes examples of good practice, and extracts of the detailed case studies that can be found at www.citie.org. This case study material is designed to highlight what good practice looks like globally so that other cities can learn from it.

Section three gives an overview of the results for 2015, and draws out some lessons from top performing cities We have assessed 40 cities against our framework. The purpose of doing this is to help them identify their relative areas of strength and weakness in order to guide policymaking efforts. The cities are clustered into four tiers of performance: ‘Front Runners’, ‘Challengers’, ‘Builders’ and ‘Experimenters’. This is to provide each city with a group of comparable peers that they can benchmark themselves against and learn from. The report also highlight the five cities that we currently think represent best practice globally for 2015: 1. New York City 2. London 3. Helsinki 4. Barcelona 5. Amsterdam. Although the cities in this leading group tend to perform consistently well across our indicators, there are also marked variations in the approaches that they take. The analysis of 40 cities globally shows a rich diversity of approaches to catalyzing innovation and entrepreneurship. This kind of diversity is apparent across all 40 cities.

There is no single pathway to success. Nevertheless, there are certain things that high-performing city governments share:

1. They make sure that very different areas of policy need to work in concert. Good policy in one area can be undermined by bad policy in another. As a result, they tend to have teams, individuals or strategies in place who champion innovation across departmental siloes.

2. They are open by default. They recognize that the kind of knowledge and ideas needed to drive change are unlikely to reside entirely within the city hall. As a result, they habitually find ways to work with outsiders in solving urban problems.

3. They employ styles of working that are more closely associated with start-ups than bureaucrats. They are happy to try things out and not afraid to fail. And they are increasingly delivering agile projects, prototyping, deploying user-led design and developing digital services. As a result, they are able to move quickly as the world changes around them.