Supporting Innovation: Designing a better Social Enterprise

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A version of this post was originally published on Innovation in Practice.

Columbia Business School successfully hosted the 2011 Social Enterprise Conference last Friday, where a record number of enlightened attendees witnessed a unique lineup of keynote speakers and breakout sessions focused on supporting innovation, promoting sustainability, advancing technology, and building communities. One session particularly looked at supplying social innovators with the skills needed to create new business models to capture social, economic, and environmental value. In Designing a Better Social Enterprise, Drew Boyd, executive director of the MS-Marketing Program and assistant professor of Marketing and Innovation at the Carl H. Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati, shared how to use an effective, repeatable, and trainable innovation process for designing social enterprises and bringing systematic inventive thinking to the social enterprise space.

Key takeaways from Professor Boyd’s session (download slides here) include:

• Creating a social enterprise is more daunting than creating a nonprofit or a for-profit firm. The hurdle is higher. Earning money in a capitalistic way with a mechanism that also generates social benefits takes special skills. Social enterprises need systematic innovation even more than the others.
• Innovation has a tainted image thanks to many myths such as “outside-the-box” thinking. Social enterprises need to embrace methods with documented results. Check the data!
• One such method is Systematic Inventive Thinking. For thousands of years, innovators have been using five simple patterns in their inventions, usually without knowing it. These patterns are coded into products and services like DNA that can be extracted and reapplied to other products and services. Professor Jacob Goldenberg identified these patterns in his research: Subtraction, Task Unification, Multiplication, Attribute Dependency, and Division. You can use these to create new Social Enterprise models.
• Learning how to innovate means retraining your brain to work in a new way. Good innovators are two-way innovators. They can flex between PROBLEM-TO-SOLUTION and SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM creative thinking. The key is to activate what humans already do well: going from the configuration to the market benefit. It is called Function Follows Form.
• Social and nonprofit enterprises need to build competencies around innovation just as multinationals do. Innovation starts at the bottom, not at the top. It is a skill, not a gift. Train it at the grassroots level, and work its way up the organization. Keep the CEO out of it!
• Creativity methods based on wildly divergent thinking where participants must “defer judgment” tend to inhibit ideas, not promote them as previously thought. Better approaches use small teams, usually pairs or triads, to apply structured approaches.
• Organizations without resources will not have the same market impact as organizations with resources. Small firms need a vital pipeline of new ideas and the ongoing ability to keep it full if they want a higher share of philanthropic support.
• Involve your constituents in innovation workshops. Invite diverse, multi-disciplined teams. Make sure the participants are motivated and committed.