About
City Innovations
We know what it’s like to invest energy into launching something only to learn that we built the wrong thing. Now, we help businesses validate their ideas, find the right market, and achieve sustainable growth from launch and beyond.
Our story starts with our Founder and CEO, Josh Barker. Josh has always been an innovator at heart with a passion for developing products and ideas.
While working in the corporate world, he served as Director of Innovation at KPMG and advisor to their M&A group. When offered the chance to launch a Silicon Valley-based startup, Josh knew he couldn’t turn the opportunity down. However, what the startup built ended up being wrong for the market and it failed.
With that knowledge and experience, along with several successful ventures afterwards, City Innovations was born.
Now, we have a team of innovation experts that have come together to create a process, coupled with proven methodologies and frameworks to help businesses build digital solutions that your customers actually want, faster than anyone in your market.
Collectively, we have influenced, coached, and developed 100s of successful ventures, product launches, and startups across dozens of industries — applying our real-world successes and failures to help businesses validate their venture and align their vision in order to build the right thing, the first time around.
Meet the experts.
Nora Bylsma
Project Manager
Kurt Nahikian
Head of Ventures
Greg Hayes
Director of Software Engineering
Partnering is at our core
As a Venture Studio, our brand promise is to help our clients build the right thing. Our delivery partners are instrumental in the building of that thing.
In our work we partner with three types of collaborators: capital investors, community accelerators, and delivery agencies.
- Our capital network partners help fund the founder’s ideas and their go-to-market strategies.
- We work alongside our community accelerators to develop the market-readiness for entrepreneurship, “zero-to-one” thinking and innovation.
- Our delivery agency partners have maintained national delivery-partner relationships that date back to the leadership team’s Silicon Valley days and 30+ years in the digital industry.
When a project forms, we know what delivery partner has the expert skills to get the job done. This approach to project staffing is often referred to as the “the Hollywood Model” — because it allows us to build the right thing.
With this approach we can ensure that projects like enterprise IoT, mission critical applications, data-driven replatforming, migration of e-commerce due to M&A strategies, or low code/no code applications for prototyping are done by experts, not wannabees.
We’re always looking to grow our network of best-in-class designers, engineers, and information architects — so feel free to get in touch.
Our values
We know our stuff.
- Over 40 years of collective experience.
- Rated Top 5 Venture Studio.
- Worked with top companies like Herman Miller, Haworth, Miller Knoll, Steelcase, Whirlpool, and others to launch successful ventures.
- Influenced, coached, been a part of 100s of successful ventures, product launches, and startups across dozens of industries.