Community Innovation Framework

From Nuopolis, August 2009

'Communities—cities, towns, villages, regions—can create the conditions that stimulate social innovators to transform the performance of local systems like education, economic development, health care, and more. But in most places, civic leaders don't know enough about how to do this and often shortchange their efforts or bog down in traps that could be avoided.

...By community innovation we mean changes in a local system that generate dramatic, not just incremental, boosts in the system's performance. For example, a change that reduces the education system's dropout rate from 50%—the big city average—to 10% or that reduces the transportation system's energy consumption and greenhouse gas production by 30%.

...Community innovation is a process whose effectiveness depends on a set of capacities in the community.

The process involves a progression through “stage gates”—simply put, moving from concept to prototype to launch to scaling up—with the innovation’s feasibility, sustainability, and potential impact assessed at each stage. It is a complex, managed process that requires ideas, knowledge, skills, investment, testing, assessment, and, eventually, some degree of local support and acceptance.

Innovation developers - the idea generators - use their expertise and passion to develop and implement an innovation or set of innovations for a particular local system. They have deep understanding of how a system works and focus their energy on ideas for improvement; they may be working inside the system or outside the system as an independent innovation developer. But innovators don’t usually conduct the innovation process by themselves; they play an indispensable role, but so do three other types of players in the community.

• Civic innovation brokers see the need for broad change in the community and use their standing, connections, assets, and other resources to help prepare the local environment for change in general and to support particular innovations. Civic brokers are likely to be well connected, independent actors often working behind the scenes with a vision of community betterment.
  
  
• System change agents have authority or standing in a particular local system (education, land use planning, business retailing) and decide to champion changes in the system. System change agents focus on the complex system they run; usually they are professionals with experience at balancing the many and often competing interests at work in the system and preparing the system for change.
  
  
• Innovation investors provide risk capital for innovation development, and may attract other investors to innovation projects. Innovation investors typically work in philanthropic organizations and, more rarely, in government agencies. Sometimes a local business or high-wealth individual will invest in innovation development. An essential skill for investor success is the ability to run rigorous “due diligence” on proposed innovation investments.

...elements of a local innovation infrastructure:

• Innovation Incubating. Provide technical assistance to local innovators, giving them access to consultants (from inside or outside the community) with expertise in the field relevant to the innovation and with experience in developing concepts and prototypes, implementation, and scaling up. This support could involve rigorous review of the innovator’s ideas; help designing prototypes and planning implementation; development of strategies to obtain investment; and more. There are many ways to deliver this assistance:
  
  
  • a venture forum in which innovators pitch their ideas to panels of experts and investors;
  • a more traditional client-consultant process;
  • a peer-to-peer exchange in which innovators critique each other’s ideas;
  • a prize process that has innovators apply for resources through a process that assesses multiple innovation plans and selects the best for support.

  What matters is that innovators experience an in-depth examination—“tough love,” no holds barred—of their ideas and work that leads them to develop strong plans for the next stage of the innovation development process.

• Innovation Importing. Aggressively seek to identify the “edge of innovation” in fields of importance for community change. Whatever the quality and quantity of locally developed potential innovations, communities should know what the state-of-the-art of innovation is in a field and should be open to bringing high-potential ideas into the community. Importing starts with scanning for innovations in selected fields and then considering what local adaptations may be needed to make particular innovations work. Multiple communities can team up to conduct importing activities, since they don’t have to feel proprietary about innovations from elsewhere.
  
  
• Innovator Networks. Using meetings, events, Web sites, projects, and other tools, connect innovators to each other—to share their war stories and zeal; to coach each other and enter into promising collaborations. Connect innovators to the community’s civic innovation brokers, system change agents, and investors. Connect them to potential mentors in the community. In short, build relationships among innovators so they know, support, and work with each other more easily and more often. At the same time, honor innovator effort and success through awards and other recognition. Through recognition and connections, strengthen a “culture of innovation” in the community.
  
  
• Innovation Funding. Bring together investors—from philanthropy, government, and business organizations, and individuals—to assess the availability of innovation capital; explore ways to coordinate their investment strategies and transactions; and to consider adopting and implementing high standards for due diligence on innovation proposals.
  
  
• Innovation Stimulus. Conduct serious review of the performance of key systems serving the community and identify the “brutal facts” of performance that community members should know and system leaders should be accountable for improving. Increasing pressure on local systems to boost performance helps to increase demand for innovations and creates more “room” for innovators to do their work.'