(Third in an occasional series on the discipline of social innovation.)
Our friends at the Corporation for Enterprise Development recently awarded four social innovators with in-residence fellowships with the Washington, D.C. organization to develop and launch their ideas. We've written previously about the challenges of searching for potential innovations, but CFED's selections reminded us that finding the ideas and people you want to support is only the beginning of the process.
Every year, nonprofits like CFED and foundations put their resources behind hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bold, new innovative ideas for BIG social impact. Each one is selected because it could become a winner. But when they pass through the gauntlet, or stage gates, of innovation--testing of the concept and underlying assumptions; design and testing of prototype in the real world; redesign for launch; and, eventually, design for scaling up--many won't succeed. So it will be interesting to see, a few years from now, how many of CFED's hand-picked innovations succeed.
Few organizations that fund and develop social innovations--nonprofits like CFED, large private foundations, smaller philanthropic funders--pay much attention to how well they do, their "batting average" for social innovation development. They certainly don't publicize their results. Most don't think of themselves as investing in a portfolio of innovations, monitoring how they do, and learning how to get better at it.
But everyone would benefit if they did keep score. Funders would have to become more disciplined about investing in social innovation--clarifying what the concepts they support are and what stage of deveopment they are in. They could start to think of themselves as managers of innovation portfolios and, once they see their batting average, learn more about how to do better. If individual funders revealed their results, the social innovation field could learn what the "industry norms" are when it comes to successful investment in innovation and could identify best practices and best practitioners for social innovation investment. Innovators, who typically have to knock on many funders' doors, could see from the data which funders have strong track records and target their pursuit of funding accordingly.
This may sound like a radical departure from current practice in innovation investing, but it's not even close to the edge of change that could be attempted if the social innovation field got more serious and less protective about its work. If this sort of data about social-investment performance became available, a next step could be Internet-based "crowd sourcing" decisions about social investment--by asking people in a particular field to assess a proposed innovation investment or voting for the best of a set of innovations. Here's another step: organize virtual "prediction markets" in which participants purchase and sell stock in a set of innovations starting up or already underway. |
