Identifying the university’s innovators

There are two kinds of people that make innovation initiatives successful - those who focus on building the internal platform required to develop organizational innovation capabilities; and those who turn ideas and research into new programs, products and services. The former are more strategic and tactical, the latter more operational and rare.

I try to build alliances with my colleagues in the former group in order to support the later group. How do I identify this latter group? Here are some things I look for:

• People who can make things happen rather than people who have lots of ideas.
  

• People who have created results as an individual.
  

• People who make decisions even when they feel they do not have enough information.

• People who like provocative questions versus becoming defensive and combative.
  

• People who keep a user group in mind when doing their research, and actually interact with them.
  

• Those who are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns that point to opportunity.

A great way to find potential innovators is to look at who is applying for internal development grants, from our campus as well as the university system. They have a vision and are prepared to do the hard work required to make it a reality.

Measuring innovation

How do you measure the return on investment in innovation? Recently, there was a good discussion in the Leadership+Innovation community at LinkedIn comprised of people working on the intersection of leadership and innovation in large and established organizations.

I like the way Jeff Murphy, an Executive Director at Johnson & Johnson suggests how to manage expectations:

1) Initially, focus on engagement, training and participation of individuals.

2) Then, as you begin to build a critical mass of capable individuals, the focus shifts to your innovation pipeline (e.g., flow of projects through concept, development, launch, etc.) and early wins.

3) Finally, as your initiative begins to mature, your focus shifts to the end goals - return on investment, successful new programs launched, impact from new launches, etc.

Jeff Murphy says that if an organization gets ahead of itself in the metrics area, it can lead to unrealistic expectations during the early stages. On the other hand, if it gets behind on implementing the appropriate metrics, it leads to under performance.

I couldn't agree more. Everyone it seems is itchy to get to number three but struggles because the groundwork has not be laid.

Innovation blossoms where the sectors converge

The celebration of social entrepreneurs and enterprises - reaching a zenith in 2006, when Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank—the pioneers of microfinance—won the Nobel Peace Prize, tends to obscure the mechanisms that result in positive social change—the innovation itself—according to the authors of Rediscovering Social Innovation, an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review Social.

They think the advantage of examining the pursuit of positive social change through an innovation lens is that this lens is agnostic about the sources of social value. Unlike the terms social entrepreneurship and social enterprise, social innovation transcends sectors, levels of analysis, and methods to discover the processes—the strategies, tactics, and theories of change—that produce lasting impact. Social innovation will certainly require understanding and fostering the conditions that produce solutions to social problems.

The mechanisms of social innovation—the underlying sequence of interactions and events—change as a society and its institutions evolve. Nonprofits, governments, and businesses have had various roles. These social innovations during the 1930’s were driven by a more expansive and direct role of government. The devolution of public services which began in the 1980’s such as day care, nursing homes, even military services to the private and nonprofit sector continues today. Since the 1960’s, pressure on the private sector to consider the social impact of its conduct has grown tremendously.

The authors believe that we increasingly see the three sectors joining forces to tackle the social problems that affect us all based upon a better appreciation of the complexity of global problems such as climate change and poverty. They do so by exchanging ideas and values, shifting relationships, and the integrating private capital with public and philanthropic support.

An example is socially responsible investing which simultaneously considers the social, environmental, and financial consequences of investments, applying the ethos of the nonprofit sector to the most purely financial of decisions: investment.

In principle, many people accept the trend of dissolving sector boundaries; in practice, however, they continue to toil in silos.

The authors say that to support cross-sector collaborations we have to examine policies and practices that impede the flow of ideas, values, capital, and talent across sector boundaries and constrain the roles and relationships among the sectors.