The Urban Innovation Fellowship

This unique program embeds talented innovators into New York City’s government agencies to tackle the problems that matter most. Instead of innovation trickling down from City Hall, the Fellowship creates a decentralized, bottom up network of change-makers working where government delivers services to millions of New Yorkers. This is what happens when you bring transformative tech talent directly into the machinery of government: transformation from the inside out.

The Urban Innovation Fellowship represents a response to a critical gap in municipal government: while many cities have invested in City Hall-level innovation capacity, far fewer have built innovation capabilities throughout entire government systems. In New York City, the implications of this disparity are stark — 300 employees work in City Hall compared to 300,000 across 50+ agencies delivering daily services to 8.4 million residents.

With support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech launched this Fellowship in 2024 to inject innovation capacity directly into City agencies, creating a decentralized “mesh network” of innovation expertise.

Seven inaugural Fellows — drawn from diverse backgrounds in product management, data science, UX design, urban planning, and startup operations — were embedded across seven NYC agencies: the Departments of Citywide Administrative Services, Environmental Protection, Sanitation, and Transportation, plus NYC Housing Authority, the Economic Development Corporation, and the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services.