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

Innovation as Learning

• Recognize innovation as a learning and knowledge creation process
• Understand problem finding, problem selecting, solution finding, and solution selection phases of innovation
• Discover the role of knowledge brokering in innovation in your nonprofit organization

Build to Learn Pt. 1

• Understand Building to Learn as a core practice in design thinking
• Recognize personal and group barriers to Building to Learn and acquire new tactics to overcome challenges
• Identify different approaches to Building

Build to Learn Pt. 2

• Learn how to Build to Learn about a new product
• Learn how to Build to Learn about a new process/system

Bringing it Back to Work

• Compare and apply Building to Learn to existing organizational practices
• Prepare to integrate new practices until they become existing routines

Achieving Strategic Innovation

• Explore how to balance the near-term and long-term, core vs. exploratory, imperatives for long-term success
• Learn frameworks to align strategy & innovation
• Explore how to successfully tackle big, long-term mission objectives

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