Geoffrey Canada. Maurice Lim Miller. Bill Traynor. Each of these social entrepreneurs turned his back on what he'd been doing for years in the anti-poverty field.

Canada had been running a nonprofit in New York for a decade, operating programs for young people. "They were decent programs, and they all did some good for the kids who were enrolled in them," observes Paul Tough in Whatever It Takes, the story of how Canada created the Harlem Children's Zone. "But after Canada had been running them for a few years, day in and day out, his ideas about poverty started to change." For Canada, Tough explains, "The catalyst was surprisingly simple: a waiting list." It bothered Canada when one of his programs couldn't afford to serve every kid who wanted to enroll. "If all he was doing was picking some kids to save and letting the rest fail, what was the point?... Canada became less and less sure of what his programs really added up to."

Miller had been leading a community development nonprofit in San Francisco, the well-regarded Asian Neighborhood Design. One day the mayor of his Oakland asked him what it would take--if having enough money and constraining government regulations were not problems--to really get people out of poverty. Miller responded that he didn't know.

Traynor, a native of Lawrence, Massachusetts, had toiled elsewhere in the community development field for many years. When he returned to his hometown, it was a declining city filled with low-income immigrants from the Caribbean. Traynor felt Lawrence's best hope lay in engaging “extraordinary numbers of people”—thousands of city residents—in leading change. But he didn't think a typical community-development organization could pull this off. It might become dominated by its leaders and inaccessible to community members. It might end up getting in the way of change and then be hard to fix, and it probably couldn’t rally the large numbers of people that were needed. Besides, in Lawrence there already was a thick layer of nonprofit organizations, and they weren’t making enough of a difference.

Each of these men decided to try something new. Geoffrey Canada created the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), a nationally recognized bold experiment in moving thousands of low-income minority children in a single place into the middle-class mainstream of college enrollment and completion. Maurice Lim Miller created the Family Independence Initiative (FII), an increasingly recognized bold experiment in moving working poor families out of poverty. Bill Traynor created Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW), a nationally recognized grassroots network with thousands of members that is developing the community's future leadership.

Hmmm. This raises many questions:

• What made it possible for these entrepreneurs to acknowledge the insufficiency of their knowledge, organizations, and past efforts?
• What made them, in the face of these big challenges, decide to up the ante and seek even bolder results than in the past?
• What made them find a different set of ideas about what to do? What does it mean that each of them rejected the community-development system they had been a part of?
• What does it mean that their creations--HCZ, FII, and LCW--seek to replace entire existing systems for reducing poverty in communities?

A recent article in Harvard Business Review, based on survey/interview of 3,000 creative business executives, described five "discovery skills" common to visionary entrepreneurs that might shed some light on answers to the questions above:

• Associating--making connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, and ideas.
• Questionining--asking "what if," "why," and "why not" questions.
• Observation--closely noticing details.
• Experimenting--trying out new ideas.
• Networking--linking with really smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn.

Where did these entrepreneurs get their ideas? Jeff Dyer, a professor at Brigham Young University, said the study found that "All the innovative entrepreneurs also talked about being triggered, or having what you might call 'eureka' moments. They would use phrases like 'I saw someone doing this, or I overheard someone way that, and that's when it hit me.'"

Finally, what, if anything, do the answers to these questions tell us about how to spark even more big-thinking social innovation?