In-Person

The 2023 Public Safety Summit

Activating a Bold Vision

When & Where

April 21-23, 2023

Harvard University | Cambridge, MA

Enacting a New Vision

The world is demanding not only swift and robust response to crime, but also innovative and equitable methods of ensuring community safety. Incremental change won’t be enough. Public safety leaders must activate a bold new vision.

A cornerstone of this bold vision will be to achieve an entirely new level of value, legitimacy, and trust in public safety. To accomplish this, leaders will be called upon to rethink policies and practices, embed new capabilities in the organization and workforce, establish innovative new partnerships and collaborations, and leverage digital tools to bolster capacity. To succeed in this transformation, leaders must also galvanize the support necessary to execute wide-sweeping changes.

To help public safety leaders meet this challenge, Leadership for a Networked World and the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, in collaboration with Mark43, are convening the 2023 Public Safety Summit: Activating a Bold Vision. This event will bring together public safety and justice leaders along with leading academics and industry experts on April 21-23, 2023, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Together, we will learn and share ideas on transforming public safety. In particular, the Summit will help address critical questions:

Leadership: How can public safety leaders balance addressing crime and experimenting with new public safety models to transform policy and practice, while navigating an uncertain political environment?
Human Capital: What steps can public safety leaders take to cultivate a culture that is not a limiting factor in change, but instead attracts and retains top talent, empowers people and teams to accelerate innovation, and supports a growth mindset?
Strategy: What changes to organizational design – including systems, structures, processes, and overall operations – will be essential in activating a bold, inclusive new vision for policing and public safety?
Technology: How can we responsibly leverage digital innovations – such as data and analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and network-enabled platforms – to build the capacity necessary to address the daily realities of the job, while driving reform?

This seventh annual Summit will bring together innovative and progressive chiefs, sheriffs, commissioners, and other senior-level officials to learn and share ideas on what a vision for the future looks like, and how to lead their organizations and ecosystem partners there efficiently and effectively.

About the Public Safety Summit

The Public Safety Summit is the foremost academic research program and event for senior-most leaders to invent and realize the future of public safety and policing. To accomplish this goal, the Summit combines case studies from current public safety officials, insights from academic research, and expertise from industry experts. The Summit builds on and extends research from across Harvard University and features fresh case studies, peer-based problem-solving sessions, and topical workshops designed to create transformational solutions in public safety.

Who Should Attend?

Summit participants are senior-level public safety executives (Chief, Commissioner, Superintendent, Sheriff, etc.) in function, as well as “Chief Transformation Officers” in practice, who seek to improve organizational performance in the near term and redesign public safety for the long term.

Admission & Participation

The Summit is an invitation-only program for senior-most officials in public safety. Other applicants will be reviewed and accepted on a case-by-case basis, and according in part, to space availability. This event is supported by the hosting and collaborating organizations, so there is no tuition or fee to attend. Travel and hotel arrangements, and related expenses, are the responsibility of individual participants.

About Leadership for a Networked World

Leadership for a Networked World (LNW) creates transformational thought leadership and learning experiences for executives building the future.

Leadership for a Networked World realizes its mission through a combination of executive education, real world case studies, and learning insights that help leaders and policymakers across disciplines and sectors improve organizational outcomes and value.

Founded in 1987 at Harvard Kennedy School, LNW is now an applied research initiative of Dr. Antonio M. Oftelie at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard.

LEARN MORE

Past Events from LNW

Through in-person Summits and virtual Session Series, LNW has delivered more than 200 learning opportunities and gathered more than 12,000 alumni globally. Below is a sample of events similar to the Catalyst Collaborative.

2020 Virtual Summit Series For Chief Financial, Operations, And Supply Chain Executives
Leadership for Resilience and Growth

In 2020, leaders around the world have been tested as they respond to the crisis of our lifetime – COVID-19. This black swan event, characterized by its extreme rarity and severe impact, has created a moment of profound disruption that demands new levels of resilience and growth from firms.

Now, the leadership of chief financial officers and chief operations and supply chain officers has never been more important. Leaders are being called upon to not only respond to this pivotal crisis, but also develop a plan for navigating through an uncertain future. While challenging at every level, this crisis has also illuminated innovations, business models and ecosystems that have the potential to impact growth, agility, and resilience over the long-term.

The Virtual Summit Series features Harvard faculty, subject matter experts, and current chief financial officers and chief supply chain officers. Participants will take a leadership view and address how this crisis can become a catalyst to bolstering newfound strengths and fixing gaps that have been identified in finance and supply chain operations.

2019 Health and Human Services Summit
Purpose, Passion, and Impact for the Future

Forward-looking and resolute leaders are also keenly aware that health and human services organizations will never fully achieve their mission or legitimacy until all people have equity in opportunity and outcomes in order to achieve their full potential. In our world today, there are still too many communities in need, too many families stuck in generational poverty, and too many gender and racial disparities in outcomes.

Now what’s foremost on the mind of leaders is igniting the vision and mission for a generative future – one in which services and solutions not only address the complex root causes and barriers to better health and human services outcomes, but also invest in community-driven innovation in order to build the social and economic mobility that help individuals and families to flourish. This level of purpose, passion, and impact for the future will require courageous leadership.

The Health and Human Services Summit is the foremost academic research program and event for senior-most leaders to invent and realize the future of health and human services.

2019 Next Generation Operations Summit
Leading into the New Pace of Change

What if your customers could co-design an entire service or product virtually with your firm–-how would that change your operations? What if a supply chain could “think” on its own--what would than mean for your business? What if value shifted from single firms to broader ecosystems and networks--how would that impact your current business model, and create new ones?

These questions aren’t alluding to a distant future; they’re highlighting advances that are now driving a new pace of change--one that is faster than ever before.

This Summit brings together select private sector operations and supply chain executives, industry experts and leading academics at Harvard University to understand the changing environment in supply chain strategy, learn about and share ideas on emerging business models, and prepare the next generation of supply chain leaders.

2019 CFO of the Future Summit
Value at High Velocity

As the global pace of change accelerates, it’s clear that social, digital, and economic disruption is creating new business models while upending long-successful industries and markets. Yet what isn’t clear is how readily organizations and talent can adapt at the same speed, or faster than, the prevailing pace of change, and what talent models are needed for sustainable advantage and value creation.

In this high-velocity world, chief financial officers must now foster talent and teams that can create value in new ways and at a new pace. This is easier said than done. Historically, CFOs and their teams focused on creating sustainable competitive advantage over time in clearly defined and relatively stable markets. Now, talent will be based on renewing value in real-time in rapidly shifting and dynamic environments.

This Summit will bring select private sector financial executives, industry experts, and leading academics together at Harvard University to answer these questions, grapple with the changing pace of change in finance, learn about and share ideas on evolving and emerging business models, and prepare the next generation of talent to become chief financial officers.

David Brown

Superintendent

Chicago Police Department

Joe Chacon

Chief

Austin Police Department

Michael Cox

Commissioner

Boston Police Department

Kathy Lester

Chief of Police

Sacramento Police Department

Iain Livingstone

Chief Constable

Police Scotland

Karhlton Moore

Director

Bureau of Justice Assistance

Danielle Outlaw

Commissioner

Philadelphia Police Department

Keechant Sewell

Commissioner

New York City Police Department

Erika Shields

Chief of Police (Former)

Louisville Police Department

Insights from Past Events

The Summit Series has consistently attracted and showcased leaders and vanguards in their field, whose insights and lessons have proven invaluable and inspiring to those they've reached. Below are a sample of lessons gleaned from past Summit sessions.

Pursuing Transformation in the “Tug of War” in Policing: Leadership Insights from Baltimore Commissioner Michael Harrison

In the course of more than three decades in law enforcement, Michael Harrison, the Commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, has had to navigate a wide array of challenges. After joining the New Orleans Police Department in 1991, he gradually climbed through the ranks of the organization before becoming the department’s Superintendent in 2014. In that role, Harrison helped the agency navigate a federal consent decree at a time when the Department of Justice had...

Leveraging Technology To Become A Learning Organization: Lessons from the Los Angeles and Seattle Police Departments

Thanks to advances in digital technology, law enforcement organizations increasingly have access to more and better data. Yet there is a difference between acquiring technology and information versus leveraging it to become a “learning organization” that is “skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.” In the case of policing, becoming a learning organization...

Creating “A Force Multiplier”: Lessons from Denver on Developing a Comprehensive Alternative Response Program

In 2020, the Denver Police Department (DPD) was confronting a challenge. As Chief Paul Pazen noted, DPD had experienced dramatic increases in its workload. Yet the organization had barely grown. This meant that DPD needed to increase efficiency and impact, particularly when it came to responding to mental health-related service calls, which were up 17 percent. Fortunately, the department had a model for success. In 2016, it had introduced a co-responder program that paired mental health...

Navigating the Arc of Policing: Leadership Insights from Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore

Since joining the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 1981, Chief Michel Moore has navigated extraordinary change along what he describes as the “arc of policing.” Concretely, this has involved adapting as the department evolved in the aftermath of major challenges, including the Rodney King riots in 1992, the introduction of a federal consent decree in 2001 after the discovery of a chronic series of failures in supervision and command oversight within the department, and increasing unrest...

The Chief Growth Officer Podcast

The Chief Growth Officer Podcast, hosted by Dr. Antonio Oftelie of Harvard University, illuminates ideas on achieving transformational growth in outcomes and value.

The podcast features iconic executives and change agents as they share stories and ideas on growing the organizational and personal capacity to achieve breakthrough innovation and change and most importantly – generate outcomes that make a sustainably prosperous, equitable, and just world.

The Chief Growth Officer podcast will help you lead organizations, institutions, communities – and yourself – into transformational levels of growth in outcomes and value.

View All Episodes

Latest Episode

Forging a Brighter Future with Dr. Cynthia Croom and Metro Action Commission

Listen Now

HOSTED BY

Leadership for a Networked World’s applied research, student innovation challenge, and on-campus summit programs are an initiative of Dr. Antonio M. Oftelie, Innovation Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH), part of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. TECH is a hub for students, faculty, alumni, and government and industry leaders to learn together, collaborate, and innovate. LNW accelerates these efforts by connecting leaders across sectors and developing cutting-edge thought leadership on innovation and organizational transformation.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

Mark43 builds the world’s most powerful public safety CAD, RMS, analytics, and property and evidence platform. Public safety has changed in the last 30 years. Technology vendors haven’t. Mark43 provides a refreshing, proven, enterprise implementation experience and product for any agency, with a special competency for major agencies. The cloud-based products are built only with the most modern technologies and are constantly updated, guaranteeing that the platform always outpaces the rest of the market. In addition to offering the leading public safety technology platform, Mark43 also offers industry-leading customer care. With comprehensive implementation, launch, and sustainment support, Mark43 ensures every customer is cared for no matter the circumstances.

Enacting a New Vision

About the Public Safety Summit

Who Should Attend?

Admission & Participation