Needs-based Innovation

I’ve lived in Baltimore for barely a month but I know two important things already: Snow Balls are the local delicacy and place matters. Ask any local and they can tell you exactly where one neighborhood ends and another begins down to the corner (even if those lines are debatable). That is, in Baltimore it’s not just place that matters but neighborhood, block, and street that matter.

Today at the Living Cities summit two big themes have emerged that I think warrant mentioning: the idea of “city as petri dish” and “doing what you can with what you’ve got”. Both have merit but may mean very different things depending on where you are.

Steven Johnson, author of the book Where Good Ideas Come From and more recently The Innovator's Cookbook, talked about how the serendipitous bumping up against one another in cities is what creates the context and environment for innovation (an idea first espoused by Jane Jacobs, later by Richard Florida and more recently by science). While this is most certainly true within middle and upper middle-class contexts I wonder if the theory holds weight in poorer neighborhoods and in cities that are not brimming with what Florida has famously called “the creative class”. Take the East Baltimore neighborhood where I currently reside. Though the unemployment rate is officially 9.2% this does not take into account those who have dropped out of the workforce all together. For those outside the workforce the prospect of re-entering it becomes ever more daunting with each passing month. And for those actively looking things are not especially optimistic: I’ve spoken with people in my neighborhood who have sent out hundreds of resumes and have not received a single call back.

All of this is not to say that innovation isn’t important in low income communities or that the unemployed are not finding creative solutions to address their economic hardships (it is and they are). It is more to say that in cities where there is chronic unemployment people are facing vastly different circumstances than those living in cities that are thriving (however we are currently defining that). Jobs may in fact be more important in East Baltimore than, say, Palo Alto.  Context, place (and yes, street) do matter when thinking about the kinds of things that will move communities forward. In other words, innovation must be needs-based.

And this is why the other theme that has emerged today feels spot on when thinking about places like Baltimore, Detroit, and Cleveland. Walter Wright summed it up quite nicely this morning, “it’s about using what you have and finding new ways to reconfigure it”. Or what Andrew Plepler acknowledged in the afternoon, “We don’t have the luxury of experimenting anymore for the sake of experimenting”. That is, we must do what we can with what we’ve got, we must find—as Johnson later noted—“the adjacent possible”.

This post originally appeared on Next American City, September 27, 2011