Innovate Local

Innovate Local

Reimagining City Regulations to Empower Entrepreneurs.

Cities Work is hosting an invite-only policy hackathon, Innovate Local, from October 16-18, 2024 in Kansas City, Missouri.

Innovate Local brings together leading experts to instill new energy and innovative ideas into the local small business regulation field that is characterized by outdated and exclusionary policies. There will be 20 individuals representing key stakeholders in this issue such as policy experts, local officials, entrepreneurs, design thinkers, and community leaders split into four teams to tackle the prompt of building a new city small business code from scratch. Designing a city’s small business code from ground up provides the unique opportunity to bring diverse stakeholders to the table whose voices have been left out of policy creation and provide a space to design cutting-edge city regulations that promote entrepreneurship while being untethered to the divisive political environment that can constrain innovation.

The teams’ ideas will be incorporated into a report that will serve as an idea starter kit for city councils to encourage innovative small business city policy reform. Additionally, select ideas that champion equitable access to entrepreneurship will have the opportunity to be further researched, developed, and potentially adopted into a city’s code.