City Government Innovation Capacity Deep Dives

City governments across Europe are under growing pressure to innovate - yet surprisingly little is known about how they actually build and sustain the capacity to do so.

The City Government Innovation (CGI) Capacity Deep Dives is a four-year qualitative research programme based at LSE Cities but working closely with a small selection of partner cities across Europe. It combines rigorous academic inquiry with practical impact, generating insights that are useful both to researchers and to city governments.

The research is guided by one overarching research question: How is city government innovation capacity developed, activated, and sustained in European city halls? We explore this across three interconnected levels: the individual competencies of city officials, the organisational capabilities of city administrations, and the broader systemic conditions that enable or constrain innovation. We are particularly interested in the enablers and barriers to innovation that are hardest to see: informal cultures, power dynamics, and the gap between what city halls say they do and what actually happens.

Our Methods

Rather than relying on surveys or conventional interviews, the Deep Dives use immersive qualitative methods that get inside how city government innovation really works. We combine organisational ethnography — long-term, embedded observation of city hall culture and practice — with peer research, training municipal officers to conduct research alongside us. This dual approach surfaces the tacit, relational, and cultural dimensions of innovation that standard methods tend to miss. All research is conducted with full ethical oversight and in close partnership with participating cities.

The Pilot Year

In 2026, we are testing these novel approaches with three European cities, each offering a different methodological configuration:

• Amsterdam, Netherlands: Led by a locally embedded organisational ethnographer, with a focus on financial and climate innovations, including the city's pioneering work on climate budgeting.
• Glasgow, UK: Peer research led by officers within the Economic Development department, with the city's Social Innovation Challenge Fund as an initial entry point.
• Bologna, Italy: a hybrid model combining peer researchers drawn from across the administration with a locally based ethnographer, focused on housing innovation.

Together, these three cases allow us to compare the strengths and limitations of each methodological approach, before making decisions about how we will approach the research with future Deep Dive cities.

Findings from this research will be shared through policy outputs co-produced with each city as well as academic publications and feed into broader research and field building on city government capacity by LSE and other academic partners.

The CGI Capacity Deep Dives programme is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies as part of the Bloomberg LSE European City Leadership Initiative and runs from July 2025 until June 2029.