Discipline of Investing in Social Innovation

The capacity for social innovation requires some disciplined processes for investing in and managing the evolution of an innovation idea from concept through design, prototyping, launch and scaling. INC has developed its own "stage-gate" system for managing innovations that applies learning from world-class methods of knowledge and idea creation, due diligence, business planning, and commercial partnering to the identification and development of community innovations. This concept-to-market process is often absent in the professional infrastructure for community innovation.

We apply these processes to our own innovation development projects--and seek to help investors in social innovation do the same.