Mayor’s Innovation Roundtable Series

Mayor’s Innovation Roundtable Series

Key stakeholders within the Maker Movement, Clean Technology, Coworking & Accelerator Spaces, Startups & Entrepreneurs, Venture Capital and Bioenergy sectors were invited to give presentations and provide insight into how their sector of the innovation community could become more inclusive and partner with City government.

Mayor’s Innovation Roundtable Series

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) Analysis

Information for the SWOT was provided by City personnel, the Mayor’s Innovation Roundtable Series, and nationally reported statistics for comparison.

The SWOT concluded that in order for Pittsburgh to remain competitive, it must not only count on its incumbent businesses and startups to innovate, but also leverage what is currently available.

Best Practices

Compelling innovative ideas are often founded from existing ones, and are perfected further through new applications and circumstances.

The Roadmap includes direct references to 80 national and international best practices from different cities, countries and municipalities.

Public Engagement and Presentations

Public Engagement and Presentations

The Roadmap team also conducted a series of internal and external meetings and presentations with members of the innovation community and City personnel. These meetings were intended to understand what other initiatives were needed from the Roadmap as well as the solutions other departments are already working on or towards.

Criteria and Prioritization

Criteria and Prioritization

The benchmarking and engagement processes resulted in a robust list of project ideas. In order to determine which of these would be impactful and relevant to Pittsburgh, each project was scored on their demonstrated value in six areas by the Roadmap Team. These areas are affordability, need for partners, speed of implementation, inclusivity, City capacity, and innovation. Projects which could be implemented quickly, reached the broadest and most in need populations, had a low start up or total investment cost, were within the current capacity of the City, and were most innovative rose to the top.