Most cities do not struggle with a lack of ideas but with the conditions that make it hard for good ideas to thrive and succeed. Marjolein Heezen and Tess Tjokrodikromo from TNO Vector explain how recognising and naming these problems can help cities overcome them.
By Alan MacKenzie
Across multiple European cities working on complex innovation challenges, the same obstacles can be seen again and again, regardless of the city’s size, geography, or ambition.
These challenges do not usually appear as dramatic failures. Instead, they surface as slow progress, unfinished pilots, frustrated teams, or promising initiatives that never quite become ‘normal practice’.
And when teams can point to a challenge, rather than a person or project, deliberate action becomes possible.
Naming them creates a shared language, and based on research in cities across Europe, we have identified 15 common challenges that together show why innovation in public organisations often feels fragile – and reveal why addressing them requires more than isolated fixes.
1. Translating vision to operation
Ambitious goals often exist on paper but turning them into everyday decisions and concrete measures proves difficult. When strategic, tactical, and operational levels are not well aligned, implementation slows down and different parts of the organisation may even work against each other.
2. Innovation is not recognised as core work
People working on innovation often do so without formal recognition, clear mandates, or lasting support. Innovation roles are loosely defined, leaving individuals to navigate priorities on their own and making their work easy to overlook.
3. Tension between long‑term ambitions and short political cycles
Public organisations work on long‑term societal challenges, yet political mandates operate on short timelines. This makes it hard to sustain strategic efforts that extend beyond election cycles or shifting political priorities.
4. Siloed organisations lacking integration
Municipal organisations are still largely structured in separate domains. Working across these boundaries depends heavily on personal relationships and managerial goodwill, rather than on established ways of collaborating.
5. Lack of an overarching vision on innovation
Innovation is rarely clearly defined or positioned within the organisation. Without a shared understanding of its role, innovation is treated as optional – something extra rather than essential – resulting in limited resources and weak leadership support.
6. Limited knowledge management and learning structures
Knowledge exchange relies heavily on individuals rather than systems. Lessons learned are seldom documented, shared, or embedded, which makes it difficult to retain insights beyond specific projects or teams.
7. Bureaucratic structures limit flexibility
Existing procedures prioritise control, predictability, and accountability. While important, these structures often limit communication, flexibility, and willingness to experiment, making innovation feel risky.
8. Challenges in working with private partners
Collaboration with private actors requires trust, flexibility, and time. Procurement rules and contractual arrangements often make it hard to set up adaptive, long‑term partnerships.
9. Lack of learning loops
Organisations rarely have structured ways to feed lessons from past projects into new initiatives. As a result, teams repeatedly reinvent the wheel instead of building on earlier experience.
10. Networks are undervalued and under‑organised
Informal networks play an important role in innovation, but they are rarely recognised, supported, or strategically managed. Networking happens mainly on an individual basis rather than as an organisational practice.
11. Difficulty sustaining innovation beyond pilots
Many innovations succeed as pilots because they receive temporary attention and resources. Once this support ends, scaling up or embedding the innovation becomes difficult – a pattern often referred to as the “pilot paradox”.
12. Innovation and ‘business as usual’ are different worlds
Innovation initiatives often operate in parallel to everyday work. This separation creates “two worlds” that interact too little, making it harder to integrate new approaches into standard practice.
13. High staff turnover and project-based hires weaken capacity
Frequent staff changes and project‑based work make it difficult to build lasting expertise. Attracting and retaining people who are comfortable with uncertainty and new ways of working remains a challenge.
14. Limited ability to manage risk
Public accountability and the responsible use of public funds can create the impression that failure is unacceptable. This discourages experimentation and limits opportunities for learning through trial and error.
15. Co‑creation with citizens remains limited
Although many organisations value citizen involvement, participation often stops at informing or consulting. Creating genuine co‑creation processes with active citizen input remains difficult in practice.
Organisational challenges need systemic change
Naming these challenges matters, because what remains unnamed is very difficult to change.
But public sector innovation rarely fails because people do not care. It struggles because the system was never designed to support it or recognise that is where more realistic innovation work begins.
If progress depends on goodwill, personal energy, and temporary arrangements, then innovation efforts fail when those conditions change.
Innovation capacity is not about doing more projects, but strengthening the conditions that allow learning, collaboration, and experimentation to become part of everyday work.
Some cities included in our research also took wrong turns. A few invested in pilots without addressing internal constraints, while others focused on tools before clarifying mandates. These were not failures, but reminders that innovation depends as much on organisational change as on new ideas.
Look out for part two of this blog on public sector innovation where we will share lessons learned in addressing these challenges and introduce strategies for overcoming them. But for now, what challenges do you recognise from your own organisation? We invite you to discuss them with some colleagues and make them explicit – and there you go, you’ve taken the first step towards overcoming them!
The text above is the responsibility of the authors and is not a representation of the views of NetZeroCities, its partners, or the European Commission.
