The Innovation Illusion
By Dr Amy Hochadel and Andrew Cockburn
Every city claims to be innovating.
They have dashboards, accelerators, hackathons, and “innovation hubs” with open-plan offices and colourful sticky notes. But scratch beneath the surface, and most of it is activity disguised as progress.
Cities have learned how to perform innovation. What they haven’t learned is how to embed it.
The illusion is seductive because it feels productive. A pilot launches. A photo is taken. A press release goes out. But when the project ends, the same procurement rules, budget cycles, and approval hierarchies remain in place. The system absorbs the novelty and returns to business as usual.
And let’s be honest — the press conferences, handshakes, and ribbon cuttings are fun. They feel like big moments. But that’s not innovation. That doesn’t make a city more efficient. It doesn’t change the system.
The part of innovation that matters isn’t sexy. It’s not flying taxis or AI-rendered skylines. It’s the slow, often invisible reform work inside government — rewriting procurement templates, changing budget codes, simplifying reporting. It’s spreadsheets, not spotlights.
This isn’t the fault of civil servants or city staff. Most are doing their best within rigid frameworks built for a different era — frameworks designed to minimise risk, not enable learning. The problem is structural: cities are still wired for predictability in a world that now demands adaptation.
Every innovation unit starts with ambition — “Let’s test, fail fast, be bold.” Then the weight of procedure pulls it back to compliance. Projects shrink to fit budgets; visions shrink to fit reporting templates. And when the innovation team eventually folds, the city tells itself it tried.
Real innovation isn’t a department. It’s a habit.
It happens when the people who approve budgets, manage assets, or run daily operations have the authority — and the confidence — to try something new. It happens when a procurement officer can test a new vendor model without needing mayoral sign-off, or when a maintenance team can pilot a data dashboard without a 12-month contract.
That’s what frugal innovation looks like in practice: learning within the system, not outside it.
Frugal innovation isn’t a project; it’s a posture. It’s what happens when learning becomes part of the system, not an afterthought to it.
Cities that refuse to fail don’t chase new strategies — they embed innovation into everyday decisions, budgets, and workflows. They treat reform like infrastructure: something built to last, not announced to impress.
If cities want transformation that sticks, they need to make it routine. Give teams permission to test. Simplify approvals. Capture lessons. Share what worked and what didn’t.
Because until innovation is embedded, it isn’t real. It’s just theatre.
This essay is part of our ongoing series, Frugal Innovation for Cities, based on our forthcoming book Cities That Refuse to Fail.
We’ll be posting regularly with short, grounded essays on how cities can do more with what they already have — through constraint, creativity, and courage.
If you missed the first post, Stop Selling the Future: Cities Don’t Need Another AI Fantasy, you can read it here →