“Cities will die if they don’t reinvent themselves.”

This was the core message I wanted people to bring home at this year’s VERGE Conference panel discussion on accelerating civic innovation.


If you ask me, innovation is not just about technology. It’s also about big ideas, doing things differently, and being just a little bit brave. The City of Fremont recognizes this, which is why we approach government a little differently than one might expect. We’ve got an entire team focused on Economic Development and a high-touch mentality I would argue really differentiates us from most city governments.

And innovation isn’t just contained within the walls of our local government. With Fremont’s sweet spot in advanced manufacturing, we’ve got a whole team of innovators within the City’s workforce. Take, for example, the Tesla plant. It’s not your average factory. It’s high-tech, state-of-the-art and as awe-inspiring as Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory.

Plus, with the Warm Springs/South Fremont BART Station just a stone’s throw away from the Tesla plant, our residents have easy access to advanced manufacturing jobs. There are already 35 cleantech companies that have clustered in that area. This is all part of our game plan to be strategically urban. Fremont is still a city where your kids can walk to school, but now there’s also an auto-manufacturing plant right down the road.

In Fremont, it’s everyone’s job to be innovators. Being a local government, we continually strive to deepen engagement and be as accessible to our residents as possible to embolden civic innovation. As one of my fellow panelists said, the city can be a laboratory since “problems are a natural resource for entrepreneurs.” We are seeing this unfold in real-time as our cleantech companies pursue civic partnerships to demonstrate their technology on city facilities.

In my CPA firm, every employee has a customer service title listed on his or her business card. In city government, we are striving to have that same hyper-responsive customer service mentality. In doing so, we can better leverage our existing assets to achieve the ground-up innovation that is a natural fit for our slice of Silicon Valley.