Public planners are increasingly recruited to manage collaborative innovation processes, but there is hardly any research on how they deal with the tensions they encounter in managing collaborative innovation in the institutional context of a public bureaucracy. Drawing on emerging theories of collaborative planning, network management and public innovation, the article develops a taxonomy of tasks related to managing collaborative innovation, identifies potential tensions between these tasks and the institutional logic of public bureaucracies and investigates how these tensions are experienced by frontline planners who remain involved in face-to-face interaction with citizens while managing collaborative innovation processes within urban regeneration projects in Copenhagen.