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They need to make use of off-the-shelf products accept what’s “minimally viable” at first and use speed to build momentum and raise the bar.ĭesign for the user. As the money started flowing in and we gathered to contemplate how to distribute it, there were many good ideas: Medical expenses. City innovators have to move fast before it does.
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The innovation window in a time of crisis or opportunity, whether due to terrorism or natural disaster or sudden political change, may crack open only for a short time before closing again. Eventually, the former chief operating officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston was brought on (pro bono) to oversee the collection and control systems and work in concert with Bank of America to create a robust system for processing payments. That’s why it was so important that the organization was up and running the day after the attacks, why it was better to start on PayPal than not at all. The One Fund Boston team knew that there was a limited window before the generosity flowing in from all corners of the globe would be directed elsewhere because of another attack or natural disaster. It’s a depressing reality, but the world’s attention moves from one tragedy to the next. Innovation in this case, and many others, requires invention. Mayor Menino and Governor Patrick wanted a much faster, more focused relief effort. Not with more than 200 injured survivors reeling and facing life-altering medical and housing decision. The tragic shootings at Sandy Hook, in Newtown, happened 122 days before the marathon bombings, and still the major fund collecting donations hadn’t finalized a process for distributing the funds.īest practice wasn’t good enough for Boston. After Aurora, it took 259 days - almost a year - for the funds to make it to victims. The result, according to one analysis: In Columbine, it took years for the funds to make it to victims, and even then they only received 58% of what was collected. After the mass shootings in Aurora, Columbine, and Newtown, versions of this process were put into practice in both locations.
Best practice at the time of the bombings was to have a trusted local foundation collect donations and administer the funds. When best isn’t good enough, start something new. Had John Hancock donated $100,000 instead of $1 million to establish the fund, One Fund Boston probably would have raised one-tenth as much money.īut the pace and scale of the response also suggest a handful of broader public entrepreneurship lessons for city leaders and their business partners as they go from nothing to something on many other important fronts: How did we make this happen? Both Mayor Menino and former Governor Deval Patrick announced One Fund Boston together on the day after the attacks, and businesses set the giving bar high. Every penny that had been collected was headed for the bank accounts of those most injured by the blasts. But 75 days later, One Fund Boston had distributed nearly $61 million to the survivors and families of the victims. This structure may seem counterintuitive or like a long shot. Less than 24 hours after the bombings, new incorporation papers had been filed, new bank accounts were opened, and a singular vehicle for receiving funds had been established - it was the most we could do on short notice and with no administrative funds - on a bare-bones website linked to a new PayPal account. One Fund Boston, as it came to be called, would be a new nonprofit, built from scratch at a harried pace, from office space to accounting systems. Boston would not channel funds for the survivors and the families of the victims through an existing foundation. But Mayor Menino decided to intentionally go the “new” route. Working with former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and his team in the days after the bombings, we were faced with lots of unfamiliar challenges and strong pressure to go with known solutions. On the Monday after the Paris terror attacks (and two weeks before the shootings in San Bernardino), I taught a session at Harvard Business School on what Boston’s response to the 2013 marathon bombings can tell us about going from “nothing to something” in cities. But some of the most crucial future opportunities for innovation will come from how cities respond to crisis and adversity, from climate change to economic volatility - and even to terrorism. These goals are all important to focus on. When it comes to innovation in cities, people often think of building clusters and innovation districts to attract new businesses and shift policies to favor entrepreneurship.
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