In this second blog on city innovation, NetZeroCities partners TNO show how cities – after identifying their challenges, outlined in part one – can follow five strategies to make innovation not a ‘nice to have’ but an inevitable part of their results.

In our first blog, we described 15 recurring challenges that quietly stall innovation in cities, showing up as slow progress, unfinished pilots, fragile initiatives, and innovation that depends on personal energy rather than organisational support.

But naming challenges is only half the battle. In our work on addressing complex societal challenges with public organisations across Europe, we also see something else repeating.

When teams move from “trying to deliver innovation” to “strengthening the capacity to innovate,” the work becomes less fragile. Not easier, just more durable. Innovation stops being something that happens despite the organisation. Innovation capacity grows when organisations work on strengthening five connected elements:

  • leadership,
  • organisation,
  • knowledge management,
  • network, and
  • learning.

So rather than asking: “How do we deliver more innovation?” this blog invites a different question: “What conditions do we need so innovation can survive and become normal practice?”

Building on this question, we present a set of strategies based on lessons from cities across Europe that aim to strengthen the five elements of innovation capacity.

Strategy 1: Strengthen direction and legitimacy for innovation

Many of the challenges in the first blog trace back to a simple problem: innovation is expected but not embedded. Public organisations are asked to tackle complex transitions, yet innovation is still treated as optional, project-based, or something that happens if time allows.

A key leadership strategy is to provide clear direction and legitimacy for innovation. This becomes visible when leaders:

  • Create an organisation-wide innovation agenda with milestones and a clear link between strategic goals and day-to-day choices (so innovation is not just a vision statement, but a shared direction).
  • Frame innovation needs in relation to urgent issues and politically relevant topics, so innovation is easier to defend, easier to prioritise, and less vulnerable to resistance.
  • Identify innovation champions that understand the need to innovate and have them lead innovation practices. This type of leadership focuses on facilitating the preconditions for innovation.

Strategy 2: Embed innovation in everyday work and culture

We found that, even when direction is clear, in practice innovation often fails quietly because it is continually interrupted by short‑term political cycles, urgent crises, reorganisations, or the pressure of daily delivery.

This points to an organisational issue: innovation is not yet sufficiently embedded in how work is organised.

One strategy that cities with strong cultures of innovation do is building an environment that protects space for innovation and learning. This shows up when organisations:

  • Treat innovation as a need‑to‑have by embedding it in existing structures, rather than separating it into a “nice‑to‑have” category.
  • Recognise innovation work formally, so it is not invisible labour carried only by motivated individuals. Every team should have people with innovation skills to continuously embed new ways of working.
  • Build a culture for innovation that allows room for risk, embraces initiatives, and supports communication across departments,

Strategy 3: Organise for collaboration, make boundary-spanning normal

In our experience, many public organisations still rely on informal networks and personal relationships to work across silos. That works, until it doesn’t. When collaboration depends on individual goodwill, turnover, workload, or shifting priorities can collapse the connections overnight.

A practical strategy that cities actively working on innovation focus on is investing in networking:

  • Appoint boundary spanners (or create roles with the mandate and freedom to move between domains and translate between “languages” inside the organisation).
  • Value informal networks rather than ignoring them, recognise them as a real coordination infrastructure and support them deliberately.
  • Actively participate in dialogues with external parties regarding (the need for) innovation. Creating external validation and recognition, urgency, and positive media attention can help with framing and communication.

Strategy 4: Make knowledge move, from tacit experience to shared organisational memory

Another quiet killer of innovation is the constant reinvention of the wheel. Projects may generate insights, but if there is high turnover, project-based hiring, or a lack of structured learning loops, the organisation rarely accumulates capability.

Strategies that have proven to improve this include:

  • Training and support so staff have the skills and resources to manage, use, and share knowledge.
  • Organise regular exchange across departments and with peer cities or partner organisations to build shared knowledge and understanding and reduce friction.
  • On-boarding and off-boarding practices (mentorship, handovers, on-the-job training) that capture what was learned and protect continuity across staff changes.

Strategy 5: Reframe success, make learning an explicit outcome

Public organisations usually operate under strong accountability processes: spending public money creates pressure to avoid failure, minimise risk, and justify decisions. These values are legitimate, but they can unintentionally crowd out experimentation, especially when “success” is defined only as delivering predefined outputs.

A practical shift is to treat learning as an explicit goal of innovation processes:

  • Treat learning as part of organisational culture by allocating time and resources for reflection, not only delivery,
  • Adopt the principle that learning is the goal, not necessarily “success” (because even when outcomes disappoint, learning can still increase capacity).
  • Translating learnings back to the organisation by embedding successful approaches into regular procedures and routines, so “what worked” doesn’t remain stuck in a pilot.

A closing invitation

If you recognised yourself in the 15 challenges from the first blog, you are not alone, and you are not failing. These patterns show up across cities because they are structural. But that also means they can be worked on structurally.

So here is a practical next step:

Pick one challenge that you see most clearly in your organisation (for example: weak learning loops, siloed working, or innovation being treated as side work). Then pick one strategy that would make that challenge slightly less heavy next month. Not in theory, but in practice. Who would need to be involved? What could you change in a meeting rhythm, a role description, a decision template, or a handover routine? What is the smallest version of this strategy you can actually try?

When a team can point to a challenge and connect it to an actionable strategy, deliberate action becomes possible. And that is how innovation starts to become normal practice.