Leading Innovation in Nonprofits

Breakthrough Ideas for Nonprofit Leadership

Nonprofits cannot grow without some commitment to innovation. Organizational change and innovation for nonprofits are key to high-impact service delivery. A nonprofit leader has the responsibility to provide the opportunity for change, as do the individuals to be an active part of the innovative change. This could lead to a pattern of growth and renewed birth for the organization. Through this program, you will explore the concepts of process- and design-based innovation.

Key Benefits

• Explore the theory of innovation in organizations and make direct applications to the culture and strategies of your nonprofit organization
• Learn new concepts around the idea of prototyping — designing small experiments that test new ideas for your organization
• Identify key leadership traits necessary for leading in a highly innovative and high-risk environment; look at personal leadership traits as they relate to a culture of innovation

Program Content

Achieving strategic innovation

• Understand the definition of business innovation: creation of substantial or radical new value for stakeholders and the organization by dramatically changing one or more dimensions of the existing service delivery system
• Identify tools and tactics that will help participants implement, benchmark and manage innovation strategies at the team and organizational level
• Understand the primary impediments to innovation within an organization
• Learn from a case study of a nonprofit organization that faced incredible challenges but through inspirational leadership and mission focus was able to implement game-changing innovation strategies

Beautiful Constraints – A New Path for Nonprofit Innovation

• Examine how we've become path dependent—stuck with routines that blind us from seeing the opportunity in our constraints
• Ask Propelling Questions to break free of our old ways and put the most pressing and valuable constraints at the heart of our process
• Adopt a Can-If mentality to answer these questions—focused on 'how,' not 'if' this can be possible
• Rediscover resourcefulness, and the ability to create abundance in the face of scarcity
• Activate the high-octane mix of emotions necessary to fuel the tenacity required for success

Customer-Centered Agile Innovation

• Understand the definition of business innovation: creation of substantial or radical new value for stakeholders and the organization by dramatically changing one or more dimensions of the existing service delivery system
• Identify tools and tactics that will help participants implement, benchmark and manage innovation strategies at the team and organizational level
• Understand the primary impediments to innovation within an organization
• Learn from a case study of a nonprofit organization that faced incredible challenges but through inspirational leadership and mission focus was able to implement game-changing innovation strategies