Tremendous effort goes into the preparation of comprehensive development plans, but often little effort is made, or resources budgeted, to develop the required practices to translate plan objectives into the designs of hundreds of separate development projects. Conventional urban planning and development control emphasizes the use of regulation and market incentives to shape private city-building practices. This approach assumes that developers and building professionals have the business models, capacity, and scope to create the new market-competitive designs that will cumulatively contribute to targeted outcomes.
The Next Practice innovation process takes urban planning from policy-based strategy to practice-based strategic applications. The process:
The increasing importance of urban development trends has prompted civic and business leaders to establish reform or growth alliances in their cities. These alliances typically build shared strategic intent, sponsor research, advocate policy and governance reforms, and instigate showcase projects, but they rarely match these efforts with new development practices. They therefore struggle to change the development trends that are their central concern.
The Next Practice innovation process evolves civic strategy into practice-based strategic applications. The process:
Generally lacking expertise in urban planning and development, corporations make substantial investment decisions about city-based facilities and locations without a deep analysis of the city not just as a “location” but as a “market ecosystem” for business performance. In an urban world, companies require strategic roadmaps for engagement in the city at different stages of the firm’s or industry’s development.
The Next Practice innovation process goes beyond corporate location planning to help companies or industry groups prepare their strategies for creating—and maintaining—place-based competitive advantage in a single city, or across a network of cities. The process:
The success of an urban strategy is determined by the availability of solutions brought to market for its implementation. The supply of new solutions is as constrained by micro-economic “givens”—established business models, standards, and products—as by macro-economic policy and market conditions. As in other industries, there is a constant tension between strategic opportunity for and tactical inertia against innovation. Firms that seek to be market leaders in the ‘next practice’ spaces of urban development—offering more efficient, productive, resilient, and sustainable city models—require a disciplined innovation process in which new solutions can be conceived, specified, piloted, and eventually scaled without putting current business at risk.
The Next Practice innovation process was first designed as a business innovation process for large corporations that were seeking to establish leadership in emerging markets. The process:
© Jeb Brugmann, 2009. All rights reserved. May be reproduced and circulated with authorship and copyright attribution. Source: www. jebbrugmann.com