Engagement is often framed as a communications exercise in government, something that sits at the edge of policy rather than at its core. However, evidence from multiple cities shows that structured, outcome-oriented engagement to co-design solutions with the public can function as key approach for innovation, particularly when it is designed to unlock capabilities that government does not traditionally access on its own.
In Flint, a city that experienced significant population loss following the decline of the U.S. auto industry beginning in the late 1970s and continuing for decades, where tens of thousands of properties fell vacant over time, blight became both a visible and systemic issue. Large portions of the housing stock were abandoned, yet the city lacked a reliable, up-to-date inventory of property conditions. Engagement was used to solve this fundamental data gap. Through a partnership involving Cities of Service and research institutions such as University of Michigan, Flint deployed the Blight Status App, enabling residents to report property conditions across neighborhoods.
The scale of participation was significant. Residents submitted more than 120,000 reports, complementing structured surveys that documented over 50,000 parcels. This combined dataset exceeded what the city could have produced internally and became operationally useful for planning and prioritization. It directly supported Flint’s ability to secure approximately 60 million dollars in federal funding for blight elimination, which was then used to demolish thousands of unsafe structures.
Similarly, another form of engagement can be observed in San Francisco, a major technology and innovation hub, where engagement was used to access specialized capacity available in abundance. Through the Civic Bridge program, the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation partnered with private-sector companies such as Google, Adobe, and Airbnb to bring external expertise into government projects.
The model is structured and time-bound. Private-sector professionals participate in 10-week engagements, working in teams alongside civil servants on clearly defined challenges. With the support of these external experts, the city redesigned its affordable housing application system. The new platform simplified the user experience and reduced administrative complexity, and it became the primary intake channel for housing applications, although publicly available sources emphasize improved usability and access rather than reporting specific numerical increases in application volume.
In Chicago, engagement was used to innovate infrastructure design in response to urban flooding. The city implemented green infrastructure projects developed with direct resident involvement, aligning with broader guidance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on decentralized stormwater management.
Residents participated in shaping solutions such as rain gardens and permeable landscapes, which were implemented at the neighborhood level. These interventions were designed to capture and manage stormwater while also serving as public spaces. Such projects collectively manage hundreds of thousands of gallons of stormwater annually, with individual installations often capturing tens of thousands of gallons per storm event, depending on site design and scale.
Across these examples, engagement is not simply functioning as an innovation mechanism, it is improving results, particularly in terms of adoption and implementation compared to top down approaches. A recent report by the OECD highlights that governments working with users to co-design solutions create services that are more responsive to change, flexible, and sustainable in the long term. Yet the real question is why engagement works so reliably as an innovation approach across such different contexts. The answer does not sit only in better data, better ideas, or better alignment, but in something more human. A dynamic often referred to as effort justification appears to offer a deeper explanation for why engagement is not just an effective approach for innovation in the moment, but an enduring one over time.