Why are Innovation Labs a great tool for city building?

My day job includes working together with the City of Calgary in building resilient neighbourhoods. As part of this, I work with many departments, including the Innovation Lab team.

An Innovation Lab provides municipalities space to develop new approaches and scale up what works. Traditionally, processes are often slow, siloed, or risk-averse, but with integrating an Innovation Lab into a municipal system, it offers a structured environment where residents, partners, and stakeholders can collaborate on human-centered design to help cities stay adaptable and future-ready.

As Airdrie continues to face complex challenges like rapid growth, housing shortages, congestion, service delivery pressures, and more, it will be important to build in a Innovation Lab system to turn big community challenges into opportunities for co-designed, practical solutions together.