Philadelphia launches incubator for public-safety innovation

Once the 12-week program is completed, it’s time to find the backing that will be necessary to bring the projects to fruition. The graduates won’t be going it alone, Melby said.

“Their graduation is no means the end of the engagement, because usually they’re just getting started” he said. “The mentors that they acquire during the course of the program typically stick with them to address operational development problems, but also to help them get the capital they need to grow the business.

“We’re still in touch with companies that came into the program five years ago. It takes at least 18 months, I would say, before you know what you’ve got, and it takes several years for a company to reach any degree of stability where you can declare victory.”

Growing a business requires each solution to be developed in a manner that makes it usable by any public-safety entity, not just those in Philadelphia, said Jacob Gray, senior director of the Wharton Social Impact Initiative.

“It’s very hard to build a solution for one city and expect them to have a good business,” Gray said. “And it’s very hard for a city to have a solution built for it that’s going to be best of class if they’re the only potential buyer. So we’re thinking about pilot approaches here that can be scaled nationally, or even globally.”

Anyone who thinks the FastFWD initiative is a publicity smokescreen designed to draw attention from Philadelphia’s high crime rate would be mistaken, Bellows said.

“This is something we’re thinking about over the long haul,” she said. “At the first steering-committee meeting which [Mayor Michael Nutter] chaired, one of the things that he challenged us to do is to think about models of how this remains a way of solving civic and city challenges—from public safety to education and health, and other areas where we have significant challenges—and how we can sustain that beyond his administration.”

Beyond the mayor’s direction, there also was the matter of the evaluators for the Bloomberg contest, Bellows said.

“There were 305 cities that applied for the Mayors Challenge, which first was cut down to 20, and then ultimately to the five winners,” she said. “They were very tough on us through that whole process. In order for us to make it through as one of those winners, we had to demonstrate that this was something that we were really serious about.

“They are an intense philanthropic institution that requires a ton of measurement and metrics, so the smokescreen wouldn’t have worked to get through their process.”