Municipal Innovation Exchange Toolkit: Modernizing public service through innovation

The City of Guelph, in partnership with the Cities of London and Barrie and MaRS Discovery District, recently announced the launch of the Municipal Innovation Exchange (MIX) Challenge Toolkit to help local governments modernize public service through innovation.

Cities are on the front lines of change, and many municipalities are turning to experimentation and bold thinking to meet their community’s complex and rapidly-evolving needs. As local governments are challenged to do more with less and adapt to accelerated technological advances, the MIX Toolkit outlines a roadmap for municipalities to leverage procurement as a tool to build innovation capacity and solve complicated operational challenges.

Through the MIX, which launched in 2018, the Cities of Guelph, Barrie and London worked with MaRS, Innovation Guelph, and The Guelph Lab to engage startup vendors and co-develop solutions related to road maintenance, snow clearing, and parks and trail usage respectively. Over a six-month period, the vendors were embedded in municipal planning and operations processes, working with staff and community members to design unconventional solutions to common service-related issues. Key learnings identified through the MIX have been integrated into the MIX Toolkit to help illustrate how municipalities can adopt a culture of innovation for the benefit of their residents and end users.

The MIX built on the foundation established by the City of Guelph’s Civic Accelerator, which partnered private sector startups with City departments to experiment and prototype potential solutions and assess scalability in a low-risk environment, and leveraged insights gleaned through MaRS Discovery District’s Innovation Partnership: Procurement by Co-Design health innovation program.

As municipalities move through the current global pandemic, the methods and tools outlined in the MIX Toolkit can help them develop and implement short to medium term economic stimulus and recovery responses to COVID-19 for their communities. For making longer term impact, the MIX Toolkit can support municipalities to make broader change in identifying, prototyping and procuring solutions to broad societal challenges such as climate change, systemic racism, and poverty and homelessness.

Click here to download the Municipal Innovation Exchange (MIX) Toolkit.