Photo credit: courtesy of the City of Reykjavik, Iceland

By Dagur Eggertsson, Member of the Althingi, Iceland’s parliament and former Mayor of Reykjavik

The transition from one government to the next can be a delicate exercise, a cross between a relay race and a high wire act. As the longest serving mayor of Reykjavik in seventy years, I managed a handoff at the local level with my successor when my term ended last year. Amid that shift, one crucial but behind-the-scenes part of our city’s government remained constant: the i-team (Innovation Team)*.

One of my proudest accomplishments as mayor was helping found Reykjavik’s i-team. It led crucial work citywide, including the digital transformation of our public programmes and services to make them accessible and useful to all 140,000 of our residents. Since then, the i-team has continued proving a truth I came to embrace: when mayors invest in innovation capacity, their impact on city hall lasts far beyond their administration.

The origins of the i-team

The impetus for the i-team came when Reykjavik’s public education system found itself overworked and underperforming when it came to supporting students with special needs. Specialised student services like behavioural counselling were being provided off-campus, and requests for them had spiked. As the waiting time grew to an average of 18 months, our schools also began falling behind in catering to multilingual children, whose numbers doubled over the last decade, with 80% of them unable to understand classroom instruction in Icelandic. As a result, children from all backgrounds were losing invaluable months of learning, while their parents felt increasingly ignored.

This multilayered challenge demanded a new type of municipal operation, one that would enable our city to leverage insights from data, work across sectors, and unearth new solutions. Bloomberg Philanthropies, provided the support, proficiency, and a blueprint to establish a dedicated team of five local specialists. Their expertise in data analysis, rapid prototyping, community engagement, and implementation brought the skillsets necessary to confront the problem’s complexity.

How the i-team supported schools

The team based its work on design thinking and listened to what students, parents, teachers, and administrators had to say. It held over 50 interviews and identified specific pain points for every stakeholder involved, such as broken communication methods or confusing red tape.

Then, members of the team began resolving those issues at the process level. They built a single digital platform to centralise all requests for and about childhood services, which eliminated more than 20 different paper applications. At the same time, they slashed waiting times by bringing the services to the students, rather than waiting for students to come to the services. Now, every school in Reykjavik has an in-house team dedicated to providing prompt, proactive, early intervention and solutions for students.

The i-team also launched a pilot programme that pairs native Icelandic-speaking students with non-native speakers. This, too, is working: 100% of participating children have reported making new friends, and administrators agree that the initiative has benefited native and non-native speakers alike.

Nearly 95% of teachers and administrators say that the new in-school teams have exceeded their expectations. An evaluation by Iceland’s national government has also demonstrated that education investments like these yield nearly 10% return in economic growth. This work has grown from impacting individual students and schools to benefiting the entire community.

Learning from the i-team and inspiring others

Having addressed our daunting education system, the i-team’s solutions mindset still permeates the city hall. It has become a model for all 11,000 municipal employees, showing how to break down silos and implement breakthrough ideas, informed by analytics and guided by residents’ input. As a result, the local government is continuing to foster a culture of evidence-based innovation.

As other municipalities across Iceland strive to bring in-school services to their students, they are looking to Reykjavik as a reference for how to get the job done. Similarly, the city’s multilingual pilot will be scaled across the country by the national government this coming year. A further testament to the i-team’s success, Reykjavik recently won a Seoul Smart City Gold Award, bringing its efforts to the global stage.

I hope that this work will encourage even more mayors to raise their ambitions for what their own governments can accomplish. Reykjavik’s i-team has enabled our city hall to become more proactive, adaptive, and responsive, both in tackling seemingly unmanageable issues and delivering better, more efficient services. As I look back on my administration, I feel sure that our partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies and our commitment to bolstering public sector innovation approaches and talent will form a cornerstone of my administration’s legacy, ensuring it left Reykjavik and its residents better off.

Today, cities face an onslaught of urgent challenges, from extreme heat to housing shortages to skyrocketing polarisation. Local leaders, in Iceland and beyond, are no doubt wondering how they can tackle these problems. As they do, they should take it from a former mayor: government innovation can be the answer.

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*Short for Innovation Team, and established and supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Innovation Team (i-team) programme, this multidisciplinary unit works across departments to confront pressing challenges facing municipalities. With more than 80 cities worldwide partnering with Bloomberg Philanthropies to incubate these capabilities, i-teams are contributing to a future of effective government.

Dagur Eggertsson was the mayor of Reykjavik from 2007 to 2008 and 2014 to 2024. He is currently a member of the Althingi, Iceland’s parliament.