Due to the enthusiastic response of CEOs for Cities members to the Q&A series with speakers at our national meeting, we are posting the series here on our blog.

First up is Larry Keeley, who will discuss the leadership challenges that matter most to the success of our cities and how urban leaders can develop the new capabilities and partnerships to tackle them.

Your analysis shows that governments are notoriously low producing innovators. Why?

When we do these kinds of innovation diagnostics, we don’t always know the reason. We do know the facts, and I can speculate about the structural causes. I think they have to do with the fact that governments too often don’t want to take pioneering risks, and too often have to optimize things in the short run because that’s when reelections occur.

It’s hard to get people to do something over a longer time horizon when they can’t see themselves getting a payback in the time that voters will notice and care about. It’s depressing to have to say that that’s one of the structural causes, but it almost certainly is. And again, I don’t know all of the reasons why this is the case, but that is certainly a major part of it.

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