Innovation in City Governments

by Jenny Lewis, Lykke Margot Ricard, Erik Hans Klijn

Innovation has become an important focus for governments around the world over the last decade, with greater pressure on governments to do more with less, and expanding community expectations. Some are now calling this ‘social innovation’ – innovation that is related to creating new services that have value for stakeholders (such as citizens) in terms of the social and political outcomes they produce. Innovation in City Structures, Networks, and Leadership establishes an analytical framework of innovation capacity based on three Each of these are analysed using data from a comparative EU research project in Copenhagen, Barcelona and Rotterdam. The book provides major new insights on how structures, networks and leadership in city governments shape the social innovation capacity of cities. It provides ground-breaking analyses of how governance structures and local socio-economic challenges, are related to the innovations introduced by these cities. The volume maps and analyses the social networks of the three cities and examines boundary spanning within and outside of the cities. It also examines what leadership qualities are important for innovation. Innovation in City Structures, Networks, and Leadership combines an original analytical approach with comparative empirical work, to generate a novel perspective on the social innovation capacity of cities and is critical reading for academics, students and policy makers alike in the fields of Public Management, Public Administration, Local Government, Policy, Innovation and Leadership.

206 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 2016

About the author

Jenny Lewis is an Anglo-Welsh poet, playwright, songwriter, children’s author and translator who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She trained as a painter at the Ruskin School of Art before reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has worked as an advertising copywriter and a government press officer for, among others, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. She has also written children’s books and plays and co-written, with its creator, Kate Canning, a twenty-six-part children’s TV animation series, James the Cat. Her first poetry sequence, When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996) was broadcast on BBC Woman’s Hour, translated into Russian (Bilingua, 2002) and made into an opera with music by Gennadyi Shizoglazov which had its world premiere with the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company in Perm, Russia, November 2017. Since 2012, Jenny has been working with the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh on an award-winning Arts Council-funded project, ‘Writing Mesopotamia’, which aims to build bridges and foster friendships between English and Arabic-speaking communities. Her work for the theatre includes Map of Stars (2002), Garden of the Senses (2005), After Gilgamesh (2011) and, with Yasmin Sidhwa and Adnan al-Sayegh, Stories for Survival: a Re-telling of the 1001, Arabian Nights (2015). She has published two collections with Oxford Poets/Carcanet, Fathom (2007) and Taking Mesopotamia (2014). Jenny is currently completing a PhD on Gilgamesh at Goldsmiths.