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Effective leadership is critical in driving innovation and success in organisations, particularly in today’s rapidly changing environment. However, achieving effective leadership at all levels of the organisation can be challenging. This chapter argues that understanding how the brain functions is essential for innovation leaders to achieve positive results and higher rates of success in their projects. By analysing relevant research on neuroscientific functioning patterns and developing interventions based on these foundations, this chapter establishes that the brain’s self-organising ability and cognitive processing systems offer valuable insights for effective innovation leadership. Based on neuroscientific evidence this chapter concludes that effective innovation leadership should focus on inviting others to engaged co-creation, rather than directing others to perform specific tasks as if they were ‘a prolonged arm’. Additionally, effective innovation leadership integrates insights from information processing in the brain by providing behavioural-oriented impulses that activate the brain, enabling individuals to maintain focus, restore motivation or emotional stability, enhance mood and confidence, and increase cognitive flexibility. Evidence-based interventions range from structured breaks to powernapping and walking. The importance of self-leadership is stressed throughout the chapter. By deriving solutions from an understanding of how the brain functions, interventions that may have been known for a long time can become evidence-based and optimised for use in organisations. Future research could explore the intersection of neuro- and behavioural science with leadership to further innovate organisational principles.

Public schools possess a unique constellation of opportunities and challenges for mental health service provision. Schools, as settings within a larger ecological context, can be a community institution that supports a child as s/he develops assets for resilient development while providing opportunities for a range of life choices. School is the setting where children can learn and practice peer relations and social norms, and it can be a refuge where children who have many environmental risks can find structure and effective methods of success (Doll, 1999). When Willie Horton, the infamous bank robber, was asked why he robbed banks, he responded, “Because that's where the money is.” At a most basic level, schools are where the children are. Every day more than 52 million students attend over 1,14,000 schools in the United States, and including the 6 million adult staff, this amounts to almost one-fifth of the population passing through the Nation's schools on any given weekday (New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, 2003).

In this chapter, we analyze the interactions between local governments and citizens’ initiatives. In the Netherlands, local governments take up the role of civic enabler based on a modest approach that leaves citizens room to invent and design initiatives on what they deem to be public issues by facilitating and activating their efforts. We focus on how a proactive form of this approach toward citizens’ initiatives in deprived neighborhoods affects citizen–government relations. Our research is based on a case study in the city of Amsterdam. We find that particularly more women and migrants took up a wide variety of initiatives, which suggests that the neighborhood approach is more inclusive than deliberative approaches. We also find that initiators developed a positive attitude toward public institutions that enable them and that they started to see frontline workers as collaborators in their initiatives with whom they could have personal and authentic interactions, as opposed to the cool bureaucratic response from government officials that they were used to. To close the chapter, we discuss some risks of the proactive enabling approach, we compare our findings to problems that citizens’ initiatives often face during their interactions with local institutional actors in the Netherlands found in other literature, and we briefly discuss possible implications of practicing a modest enabling approach for developments in governance.

The boundaries of Little Italy are not precise, and have shifted over time. In the 19th century, the district extended south of Canal Street into the area identified by Jacob Riis as the “Mulberry Bend,” and described as “the foul core of New York’s slums.”³ By the 1960s, Little Italy had retreated across Canal Street, as the Italian population began to leave the neighborhood for other areas in the city. For the purposes of this paper, Little Italy shall be understood as comprising three census tracts in New York City’s Manhattan county, numbers 41, 43, and 45. This area, lying within a short walking distance of City Hall, is roughly bounded by Canal Street on the south, Bowery on the East, Broadway on the west, and East Houston street to the north. Nicknamed the Mulberry District, it became the first and largest Italian enclave in the United States between 1870s and 1924. While there had been an Italian community in New York for generations, historian George Pozetta has argued that the winter of 1872–1873 was pivotal in the development of this community, when more than 2000 poor Italian immigrants, arrived at Castle Garden, the immigrant reception center, unable to care for themselves.⁴ These immigrants were quickly fitted in to the preexisting Italian community, taking advantage of the contacts provided by the bossi, typically northern Italian men who had arrived earlier, to find jobs in such local enterprises as groceries and saloons, and with American employers. Once the new comers settled, a process of chain-migration began. By the later 1870s, the bossi were acting as agents for gangs of labor sent out from New York to work in other areas across North American. As a result, the Mulberry district became a sort of transshipment point for Italian labor.