Creating ways for innovation outside of the office

I found another article to go with my previous one about history and public policy.  This one is from the view of a board member on the project.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1525/tph.2010.32.2.82.pdf

Crosby heard about Robert Krim’s idea to rebrand Boston and wanted to check it out in 2004 and ended up on the board, and later became chairman of the board.  He is interested in the public policy side of the project Krim was trying to do.  Crosby and the rest of the board had to find a connection between Massachusetts historical past and that of today’s public policy, and try to learn from the history to fix the policy problems of today.  To figure out this problem the board was trying to find the history junkies and the policy junkies to get some perspective.  The board found people involved in policy issues are interested in history as well which made a great pitch to leaders getting involved with the collaboration. 

            The board created the “5^th Century Trustees” to keep Boston successful.  The strategy of the trustees was to provide intellectual direction for the research of the project, and to generate buy-in to the use of the questions they were going to ask and credibility to whatever the results were.  The trustees were influential leaders like university provosts, presidents, governors; a former speaker of the House; governor, sheriff; CEOs and others.  They worked on the civic action agenda, looking at policies started in history that helped the public; technological and social innovations; and short and long term tactic strategies.

The board and trustees worked together with other members of the Collaborative to come up with ways to keep the innovations going in Boston.  They did this by creating new places for the public with a wireless capacity, and other ideas to make innovation easier.