Seeding an urban policy lab as a collaborative platform was the essential first move in a centrally steered, hierarchical ecosystem. Collective policy innovation cultivators, led by university professors, played roles in using this new space to convene municipalities, civil society, innovators, and residents; translate ideas into experiments; and normalise learning with a licence to fail. As discourse agents, they secured vertical collaboration with national authorities and with municipal political and executive leaders by reframing dominant narratives in the policy and institutional frameworks to legitimise civic and social innovation rather than technology alone and by anchoring the storyline in everyday practice and material cues to make this new way of working visible (to develop a shared meaning of these new ways of working). Humility and boundary-spanning tactics softened status barriers and built trust. A subsequent political transition triggered risk aversion and consequence-avoidance within the bureaucratic executive, creating uncertainty and a halt in operations with this municipality. Embracing uncertainties and being robust, the cultivators sought to create collaboration momentum by widening engagement in a spiral across the city, drawing in additional actors and jurisdictions to keep the ecosystem generative.