Charlie Rowat is my usual co-conspirator on the SIDEBAR podcast, where we talk about innovation in the corporate world. But for this crossover episode, I pulled Charlie into the Challenger Cities realm to explore what changes when you swap corporate executives for councillors, consumers for citizens and quarterly shareholder updates for public accountability.
Charlie has spent the past few months working with local councils in London and Essex around an innovation program with Rainmaking and Thames Gateway for adult social care. This isn’t the shiny side of public sector innovation, and more the typically underfunded, heavily regulated realm and very human realm where budgets are tight, stakes are high and optimising margins feels like a luxury compared to dealing with crises.
Survival Before Strategy
"Lots of will, lots of appetite, no real budget," Charlie said, describing the councils he's been working with. "I mean, literally they are struggling to keep the lights on."
In corporate life, ‘there’s no budget’ often actually means ‘convince me’. In local government, it usually means exactly what it says. In the context of UK local government, something like 40% of their entire budget is taken up by adult social care, and it’s still not really enough.
"You’ve got to be really pointy about doing it in that local council context," he explained. "It needs to stack up in terms of how is this gonna save money—preferably immediately or further down the line."
In adult social care, that means reducing demand altogether. Not just making service delivery more efficient, but working upstream to avoid the need for services in the first place. It sounds obvious, but the money-saving often happens in someone else’s budget. That means your council led innovation might see more of a fiscal benefit for the NHS, while the incubation in terms of time, energy, cost and risk came locally.
Not that these are two sides working against each other, or the individuals are doing it for career gain, far from it, but it’s not always co-ordinated and there is an imbalance.
What Counts as Value
This kind of work forces a rethink of what “value” actually means. In a corporate setting, value usually shows up as revenue, margin or market share. But in the context of a city, it's measured differently. Is someone able to age with dignity? Are services reaching people before crisis hits? Are fewer people falling through the cracks?
“I realised I started this podcast by saying there's such a commercial lens ... but I think they're better at measuring value in different ways,” Charlie said.
That doesn’t mean cities are less rigorous. If anything, it’s the opposite. The goals are more human in the form of dignity, access and belonging, also harder to fake. The benefits might not accrue to a single department or generate a neat return on investment. But they ripple out to mean less strain on the NHS, fewer emergency callouts, stronger communities. You may not be able to bonus someone off the back of that, but it’s how cities stay functional in some ways that companies might not.
Innovation Under Constraints
"The adult social care budget accounts for 40% of council spending on services," Charlie pointed out. "So they are primarily concerned with how can we do that in a cheaper way."
That makes prediction and prevention important, moving away from what has traditionally been a reactive system. One project in Barking and Dagenham used predictive models to identify residents most at risk of falling. They then trialled interventions like grab rails, physio referrals and medication reviews.
"They were taking a really nice experimental approach and doing a randomised controlled trial," Charlie said. "And again, this is part of being a public body, being accountable for every penny that you spend."
The surprising part was how unceremoniously it was framed. "It wasn't framed as innovation. It was just treated as work."
Cities Run on Urgency
If you have that giant portion of your budget being an aging population that you’re on the hook for, it makes you much more hungry. It’s like an existential crisis, and the much discussed burning platform for innovation. Companies often have to look for theirs, but in many urban contexts, it’s starting the politicians and local officials in the face.
Charlie agreed. There’s a different energy when innovation is born of need rather than novelty. "You certainly unlock more funding though if you are tackling those bigger problems," he added. Aligning to national priorities or guidelines, like NICE guidelines on fall prevention, helps get things over the line.
That urgency also creates a different psychology around risk. In the private sector, innovation is often a nice to have, even a moonshot, seemingly an optional bet made with spare capital. When the crisis hits in an enterprise, the timeframe is often shorter so innovation isn’t considered a viable option. In the public sector, especially in struggling cities, it’s a lifeline that I think might give more scope for creative problem solving.
The Unignorable Nature of Urban Change
"If you're a corporate and you create a new service or a new product and a person doesn't like it, they can ignore it," Charlie said. "If a city does something ... you can't ignore that."
Change in companies is typically adding features to a product or service, or running a couple of systems simultaneously. Digital banking while also running branches for example. But change in cities is often subtractive. It might be removing parking, closing streets at times, repurposing space, building something different on the land.
It also impacts people beyond the direct customers of a company, while also being fodder for the media. We talked about Paris as an example, where backlash to pedestrianisation was fierce, until it wasn’t. There’s a tipping point where the quiet supporters begin to outweigh what can be a relatively small, but very loud, group of dissenters. Getting there takes political will and confidence in the long-term gain.
It’s not often one might compare Jeff Bezos with Anne Hidalgo, but the former had to put his money where his mouth was when the internal team said Prime was a bad idea. Turns out it wasn’t. The same is true with political capital and confidence in the election cycle, so lots of people hated Hidalgo’s efforts to make Paris more walkable and cycling friendly, but now you’d see very few who want to go back to where they were.
Courage and guts are key, but in different ways depending on the urban or corporate context.
The Communication Gap
We both noted how hard it is for the public to engage meaningfully with city planning, not because people don’t care, but because the system is practically designed to exclude them. Planning proposals are often written in opaque, technical language and hidden behind clunky websites and bureaucratic processes.
“Stuff is buried in planning documents,” Charlie said. “You've got to know the code to go and search for to see what the actual proposal is. It’s ridiculous.”
By the time most people even become aware of a proposed change, the decision is often already made, or at least well in motion. Even when public input is requested, it’s rarely about vision or possibility, usually a last-ditch consultation framed around objections. In that environment, only the loudest and most resistant voices tend to show up.
Charlie shared a local example from his own neighbourhood, where misinformation played a powerful role. A leaflet circulated during a council election campaign showed a photoshopped image of a drab housing block—supposedly what a proposed development would look like. “It was just scaremongering,” he said. “My neighbour saw it and was like, ‘Have you seen what they’re planning to do?’” Even though the image was exaggerated and misleading, it stuck. Because when people are given a stark visceral picture, even a false one, it shapes the debate far more than any planning document or consultation notice ever could.
We also talked about ways to make consultation more accessible and participatory, not just by streamlining processes, but by helping people actually imagine what's being proposed. I shared an example from Henry Coutinho-Mason, who uses AI tools in his keynotes to let people sketch ideas and see them instantly rendered into realistic visuals.
It’s the kind of approach that flips the process on its head: instead of asking residents to decode PDFs or navigate bureaucratic websites, you give them a way to engage with imagination. That wouldn’t just make consultation easier, it makes it meaningful to people who don’t have the design skills that can necessarily articulate what they’d like to see. Once people can picture what’s possible, probable even, they’re far more likely to contribute, critique, and hopefully be able to say yes to something.
Who Holds the Power?
Charlie admitted that when he first started working with councils, he admits to mostly having a surface level understanding of how local government actually functioned. “Now it’s a little bit deeper,” he said, reflecting on his recent work in adult social care. He’s spent time navigating how procurement works, local power dynamics and the negotiation between local priorities and national directives. That takes time to understand, while it also helps if you can question or challenge some of it.
But as a resident? It still feels murky. “I get a magazine, Hammond Peterson, every quarter or something. And it basically just keeps tabs on like the local development projects and things that are going on,” he said. “But I’ve never been invited to any local outreach … even the consultation stuff tends to happen once the decisions are mostly made.”
That disconnect between how cities work and how they’re experienced, opened up a wider conversation about who actually holds influence in shaping change. In most companies, leadership comes with deep sector experience. The CEO, the CMO, the Head of Innovation, these are people who’ve climbed ladders, refined their ways of working and know the incentives inside out. Cities, by contrast, are often guided by a patchwork of professionals (both full time, and consultants for hire) and a sizeable number passionate amateurs. You might have a brilliant transport lead working alongside a newly elected councillor who’s never worked in the sector before.
No doubt there will also be a few that have done things a certain way for a long time with little interest in changing too.
So sometimes, that outsider energy is exactly what’s needed. It can slow things down, but it can also unlock better questions that cut through legacy thinking or ask why we’ve been doing something a certain way for years without challenge.
We both agreed there’s something healthy in that contrast. In fact, maybe it’s needed in both worlds. Cities can benefit from people with fresh eyes, not yet trained to think in silos. And corporates could stand to bring in a few more provocateurs, people unafraid to challenge orthodoxy because they never helped build it in the first place.
Our experience has always been, regardless of big company or local government that the hardest thing to disrupt is the invisible logic of “how things get done around here.”
Creating the Conditions
It took us until near the end of the conversation to talk about Bradford, Charlie’s hometown, but that’s where his magic wand landed first.
Once one of Britain’s wealthiest cities during the industrial revolution, it’s now one of the many post-industrial places struggling to find a new path forward. A while back, Charlie saw a local councillor say she wanted Bradford to become the “Shoreditch of Yorkshire.”
“That’s one of those things that sounds clever until you say it out loud,” he noted. “I don’t think she wants sky-high rents or people being priced out … but I think what she meant was: how do we create the conditions where something exciting starts to happen again?”
Shoreditch is often cited as a regeneration success story, but what gets lost in translation is why it happened. It wasn’t a design outcome so much as it was the result of a collapse in rents and a flood of creative people who could finally afford space. That’s what seeded the energy that came later like some of the transport investment.
“Shoreditch got cool because rents were dirt cheap,” Charlie said. “Artists moved in, then agencies, then the infrastructure followed.” If you want that to happen in a place like Bradford, you need to influence the part of the system you can actually touch. “That’s how you kickstart it,” he said. “Drop the rates, encourage the artists that are struggling in Leeds over to Bradford.”
His also had a backup wish took a wider view, bringing up a policy from Nigeria, where students are required to go to university in a different region from where they grew up. The idea is to build empathy, understanding and national cohesion, not through strategy documents, but through lived experience.
“Imagine if we did that here,” he said. “If every civil servant had to spend time in a different part of the country, or in a place they didn’t know.”
We both agreed that if you want to fix cities, you need people who’ve seen more than just their own postcode. It’s not enough to read reports or benchmark what works somewhere else. You have to walk around, travel a bit, talk to strangers, get lost in a neighbourhood that doesn’t work the way yours does. All the things we do when we do our corporate innovation work and explore a bit of what goes on in other industries, countries, regulatory environments etc.
Ideas don’t catch on just by being logical, but by being seen, felt and talked about. That only happens when people get out of their bubble and spend time somewhere different.
To being Challengers.
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