JRC
Joan Roberts Consulting
Helping Non-Profits Succeed!
Innovation
This was written in December of 2008 but just posted.
Innovation is becoming the new buzz word in the NPO sector and funders are actively trying to develop the capacity for innovation in the sector.
This kind of boggles my mind because I see innovation everywhere in the sector. A system planner/analyst looking at the sector might say there is too much innovation. One characteristic of the NPO sector is that a social entrepreneur sees a need and then invents a new organization and programming to meet it. That’s as much innovation as ny private sector entrepreneur who launches a new product for the marketplace. Isn’t funny how funders hate the proliferation of new agencies because of system inefficiencies but still want innovation.
I just read a presentation by Neil Bradford on a National Community Innovation System http://www.cprn.org/documents/50766_EN.pdf
The following slide really resonated with me!
Community Based Organizations are Today’s Innovators
- Adaptive to emerging resident’s needs
- Nurture leadership and citizenship
- Outreach to citizens on the margins
- Pilot new policy approaches
- Advocate systemic change
- Shape culturally appropriate services
- Holistic policy through services co-location and continuum of supports
My belief about the innovation capacity of the sector is closers to Bradford’s. The NPO Sector is uniquely innovative and is the sector that is tacking the complex social issues of our time.
Yet academics and don’t buy the product of innovation as having value until it’s been tested or evaluated to prove its benefit. So what “they” want is lots of proven innovation. Just like the private sector. Just like Canadian branch plants of international companies who do no research and development work here in Canada. A new product for the marketplace is not really saleable (a good investment) until its established a market of 5 -10 million dollars. Then it’s worth has been substantiated by all the people who have bought the product.
So maybe that’s the issue. The innovation of non profits has just not proved to be worthy. And that’s want funders really want-proven innovation. Programs that prove they make difference.
Yet that’s an incredibly complex problem. It’s almost impossible to prove that just one particular program that a client attended for a particular point in time was the one that led him to change. The evaluation that exists in the sector is often qualitative, and clear casual links between individual or community change and a particular program hard is difficult to establish. Its often only possible to get quantitative measures for numbers of participants and numbers of client contacts.
But what if we could come up with an across the board quantitative measure that we could use to measure progression in individual, organizational and community change processes? I read an interesting article The Metric behind the Slogan by Michael Schrageat that can be found at http://www.strategy-business.com/enewsarticle/enews120208 about how the measure itself transformed and catalyzed the development of industries. For instance when the measure of how many miles per gallon was developed to assess car fuel efficiency it was the key measure that provided the impetus and rationale to build fuel efficient cars.
So what I’m thinking is that we need to harness our creativity to create the measure that we can use to measure individual and social change.
Any thoughts?
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