Method

ITS America recognized the need to rapidly build alignment, trust, and shared problem definitions across diverse public agencies in order to effectively engage the private sector. Cityfi was engaged to design and facilitate a rapid, three-month accelerator that brought together transportation executives from each host region. Through a series of structured workshops, Cityfi helped participants identify best practices, common challenges, and priority outcomes. Through this, Cityfi helped the leaders draft and issue “reverse pitches” to industry innovators to bring forward solutions for consideration.

Working as a collective, the cohort built trust and alignment, leveraged knowledge, and pooled purchasing power. The Innovation Challenge drew over 40 industry proposals from around the globe. The several agencies heard pitches from 10 finalists and identified shared interest and available pathways for accelerated procurement through joint purchasing. Further, the agencies built partnerships that enabled them to use the expertise and technical capacities of one another to understand the technology and pursue deployments that could be scalable across the regions.