There is nothing like a crisis to surface where change is most needed. We have experienced, as virtually every country on the globe, a painful way of seeing where we have to do better as the Covid-19 pandemic broke in Romania, in March 2020. 

In the midst of widespread disruption, we quickly reoriented our work at the Cluj-Napoca Urban Innovation Unit towards observing and making sense of what was emerging around our city. We began by listening, reaching out to the people, organisations and businesses that were responding to an unprecedented emergency in agile and novel ways.

Recognising some lessons from a pandemic nobody prepared for

This is how the Cluj Resilience Tracker was born – a process to document the different ways in which the Cluj community was responding to a crisis situation. It is growing into a living repository and diagnosis device for the mid and long-term changes required, if we are to increase our collective capacity to withstand, adapt and recover from future shocks. 

Another layer of insights came from mapping the relationships and flows of initiatives moving through formal and self-organised networks, as they unfolded during the state of emergency. This data was harvested in partnership with community-based organisations, giving insight into the kinds of competencies and connections that people who had contributed to early responses had activated.

Turning insights from early responses into long term solutions

As we moved from research into sense-making, we asked ourselves about the principles we might extract from this intersection of response area and capacity to act in times of crisis. Taking it one step further, how could we support a shift from reaction to long-term solutions?

Once more, we reached out to our constituents. We invited stakeholders from organisations active in social research, civic advocacy, urban development, community philanthropy, journalism, healthcare and national public administration into a co-creation workshop to sketch out the elements of a pilot program intended to support public-value innovation. 

What kind of actors should the program support? What kind of results should we aim for? What areas should the program focus on?

For the who question, we chose individuals as our agile agents of change. The data pointed to such initiators who mobilised networks and latent capacities within multiple organisations, pooling resources and activating collaborative behaviours.

The research, and conversations everywhere, confirmed that the failures made evident by a compounded crisis require long term, systemic change. Our program would design for and select initiators with a systemic awareness and long term approach to their interventions. 

Four focus areas were lifted from considering needs, leverage points and impact potential: procurement based on innovative principles, solutions journalism, collaboration protocols and open data protocols.

The Cluj Innovation Fellowships, a mechanism to incubate public-value innovation

This is how, in January of this year, 10 months into the pandemic, we launched the Cluj Innovation Fellowships, an open call for doers invested in developing lasting solutions to the testing lessons of 2020. 

The outreach process for this admittedly niched program was kicked-off by a masterclass on strategic interventions for systemic impact, a custom-made learning experience to orient potential applicants into considering their initiatives as part of larger systems, reflecting on leverage points, theories of change and the capacities required to influence at systems-level. 

So what kind of support do the fellowships offer? The call was open to civic sector and research professionals who receive up to 9.000 euros in funding for the development and testing of systems-minded interventions that can better equip their stakeholders to navigate future emergencies. During the 6-month implementation period, the program will provide knowledge resources, specialised mentoring from experienced practitioners in their proposals’ fields of intervention, flexibility and support to adapt course, as well as a testing and scaling ground by partnering with public sector agencies.

In the spirit of seeing how systems-level effects are the result of a larger context and many interconnected mechanisms, no account of the making of the Cluj Innovation Fellowships would be complete without acknowledging the role that innovative funding plays. This pilot, part of our Cluj Future of Work initiative, is made possible by Urban Innovative Actions, the EU initiative providing resources to test new solutions to address urban challenges. 

Holding the ground to make innovation possible takes many instruments, processes and behaviours – research and know-how, co-creation, risk-taking, resource sharing and a long term perspective. Crucially, it takes funders who see the value of supporting enabling environments for multi-actor collaboration. We, at the Cluj-Napoca Urban Innovation Unit, are grateful to be able to be an engine / pulley in the larger mechanism setting public-value innovation in motion. 

Stay tuned for updates about our fellows’ journey.