Scott Phillips is founder and chief innovator at Civic Ninjas, where he leads a diverse group of thinkers, dreamers and doers who are transforming cities, communities and government.

Part think tank, part consultancy, and part community, Civic Ninjas grew out of Scott’s work building a grassroots technology, innovation and entrepreneur community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

In that role Scott was founder/co-founder of multiple initiatives including Ignite Tulsa, Startup Weekend Tulsa, Fab Lab Tulsa, Maker Faire Tulsa, Tulsa Web Devs, Code for Tulsa, Tulsa Open Source Hardware, 200OK Conference, and Techlahoma — all launched promoting his belief that community makes the world possible.

Through Civic Ninjas, Scott has launched multiple groundbreaking initiatives to push smart cities and civic technology into the mainstream by building the support structure needed to lower barriers to entry/acceptance and amplify entrepreneurial opportunity. Highlights of this work include helping the White House and FEMA launch innovative disaster response and recovery initiatives, helping the Texas Innovation Alliance and the Smart Cities Lab launch their Mobility Innovation Challenge, and helping the NSF and USDOT launch the National Transportation Data Challenge. Scott and Civic Ninjas also led a statewide team that submitted a proposal to build an entirely new greenfield city to support Amazon’s HQ2 - a $17 Billion proposal to build a city named Day 1, Oklahoma creating a three city super region metroplex designed to eclipse Dallas - Ft. Worth.

Scott earned his M.S. and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University, and is a successful serial entrepreneur having founded multiple technology companies. Highlights of those companies include a company that developed sensor systems for NASA for use on manned missions to mars. Among his many accomplishments he is most proud of being recognized by President Obama as a White House Champion of Change in Civic Hacking.

Partners/supporters have included the White House, NASA, FEMA, HHS, NSF, USDOT, USDOE, Ford, Mozilla, Intel, Sunlight Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Cities of Service, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Knight Foundation among others. His work has been highlighted in The New York Times, U.S. News, Government Technology, VentureBeat, National League of Cities Congress & Expo, and the SAE International World Congress.

Scott is incredibly bullish on the potential for cities like Dayton to pioneer the future of smart cities, and is excited to share his thoughts on why the time is now for Dayton to seize this opportunity.