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"Nonprofit Innovation, Part 1
Over the past fourteen months, I've been working with a great group of people on a terrific subject: how to increase the amount and quality of nonprofit innovation. This issue and next, we'll discuss some of the basis of our work, and show you some preliminary take-aways that you can use right away.

It's been long said that all the easy problems have been solved--the hard ones remain. I agree, and would add that in most parts of our culture those hard ones have been left to nonprofits. So, with too few resources, overworked staff, and boards who are often, these days, understandably conservative in developing new approaches to problems, how should nonprofits get a handle on innovating more and better. Let's look at a couple of realities.

First, innovation is not always about the big innovation--the invention of the light bulb or the concept of crop rotation. It happens in little ways every day in our lives. We figure out a better way to commute, a new way to load the dishwasher, a new play list on our iPod. If you picture innovation on a bell curve, the little every day innovations are on one tail, the big, E=MC2 innovations on the other. In between are the kind of innovations we need to do our missions better. So, while we all think we should innovate more, in fact, we already do, and we should not limit the use of the term innovation to just big, game-changing ideas.

Second, as nonprofit leaders, we can't come up with all the ideas. First, we're often too close to the issue to see it clearly, second, we're often too far away from the provision of mission to know what's going on and, finally, we only have 24 hours a day. Even though we burden ourselves with the notion that we have to be brilliant and solve every problem that our organization faces, we can't. The sooner we give that up, the better. Once we do that, we admit we need help. Then comes the big question--where is that help? Is it in our management team, our board, or beyond? Our work over the past fourteen months clearly indicates the latter-it's everywhere.

Here is the key: Put more neurons on the problem. Ask widely (including people from outside your discipline),ask often, get input and ideas, iterate on those ideas and then go back and ask again, and again, and again. That's takeaway number one......"