The assignment we've given ourselves is to analyze and think more deeply about the field of social innovation--and to figure out ways to accelerate and spread social innovations.
We see a US market for social innovation services that has expanded significantly in recent years. Civic business leadership is emerging in many metropolitan regions, with
Unfortunately, the process of community-systems innovation remains fragmented, undisciplined, slow, and financially inefficient. Except in a few situations, social entrepreneurs are isolated from each other and the means for scaling up ideas; most are undercapitalized; due diligence and market-testing processes are not effective; most innovators have weak connections at best to private businesses and markets and depend substantially on the philanthropic sector's idiosyncratic and relatively small "capital markets." Even the best performing community innovation organizations (e.g., the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, the New York City Investment Fund, the Bay Area Family of Funds) have had to cope with the problem of generating substantial deal flow within their locales and have benefited little from potential innovations developed elsewhere.
This situation is in sharp contrast to the robust innovation infrastructure that has been developed to support process, product, and business design innovation in the private sector. The system for identifying, screening, developing, prototyping and launching ("commercializing") private market innovations is well developed and well financed. Rewards for success are competitive and the field attracts some of the best human talent in the market place. Systems for due diligence and screening have been well honed over many years of trial and error. Commercialization enterprises have relationships with many different sources of capital to match the stages of development of an innovation. A robust set of different business designs for innovation commercialization is constantly evolving.
Our work at the Innovation Network for Communities is designed to bring some of these private sector capabilities to the community innovation market place.
