One of the reasons we don’t necessarily think RFPs are the best way to engage the creative insights of entrepreneurs and some of the most effective problem solvers in our society today is that we prescribe a solution in an RFP. There’s no opportunity for an entrepreneur or innovator to really work with a city through our traditional RFP process. To work on that, we are defining the problem correctly and ensuring that we also have access and exposure to the range of potential solutions.
We’re trying to go beyond the traditional city-vendor relationship or vendor-purchaser relationship, and look at how we can support entrepreneurs by opening up insight into the challenges we’re dealing with every day and leverage the ingenuity of the entrepreneur to help us create solutions.
It’s really front-loading the procurement process by bringing that engagement earlier on — during the problem-definition phase instead of saying, “Here we go; we need this specific solution.”
Our take on this is looking at how we manage risk in cities. We have supported the notion of trying to pilot things as often as we can. So instead of saying we’re going to deploy a solution, whether it’s technology or nontechnology across a city, we believe in testing that out somewhere.