Innovation comes from seeing an old problem in a new light. In the 1960’s, American children under the age of 5 were routinely given oral polio vaccinations developed by Dr. Albert Sabin. It was a successful program that saved a lot of people from a debilitating disease. It went on for years, but in 1979 a new way of looking at the problem emerged, an innovation that resulted in a daring and ultimately successful experiment.

You don’t need to be a researcher or a PhD to understand this innovation. All you have to do is realize that if you vaccinate every child as they reach age 5, you will have as many children requiring vaccination at the end of the year as you did at the beginning.  It is a never ending cycle.

But what if you vaccinate all of the children on one day?  There would be no place for the virus to go.  It would be completely eradicated and you wouldn’t have to continue vaccinating children.  In 1979, six million children in the Philippines were vaccinated as the start of what would become a massive international movement to eradicate polio.

Fostering innovation

How do you get people to see old problems in a new light?  How do you encourage curiosity and experimentation?  Guy Mallabone, a fundraising consultant, puts it well, “You have to create an environment where failure is a possibility and it is alright to fail.”  To do so you need five key ingredients:

ü  Get the Board onside

ü  Think small

ü  Set SMART goals

ü  Measure measure measure

ü  Document the learnings

Board support

Whether it is best practices shared at conferences, new government program initiatives, university sponsored research or personal professional development; charities are exposed to a lot of new techniques.  Applying the new techniques to the local situation can be problematic. Too often people think in terms of changing the whole existing programme when looking at a new idea.  Make sure you minimize risk by keeping sample sizes small and tests simple.  Emphasize that the objective is to learn whether the research works in your specific context before attempting to implement.    

Think small

Your objective might just be to test new research on a small sample of existing clients.  “We were all about evidence based practice,” says Louise Moody, the former Executive Director of a programme for single mothers, “The research at the time said to video the client interacting with her baby, but when you ask a teenager with significant self-image problems to do this, all she sees is her failure, not the baby.”  Videoing client interviews is a great tool, but it didn’t work in those specific circumstances. 

Set SMART goals

You need objectives if you are going to measure progress and the more measureable the better.  Think in terms of a series of small tests rather than one large experiment.  When the unexpected happens is when there is an opportunity for innovation.  This will be explored in a future column.

Measure measure measure

Measuring the impact of a change involving people is difficult at best.  In the above programme, the agency found that the mother’s commitment to education (as opposed to just attending school) was a key success factor.  How do you measure that?  Perhaps you can find a proxy for the measurement or perhaps it has to be a qualitative judgement by a staff member.  Whatever measures are determined, make sure that staff understand that it is the experiment that is being measured, not staff performance.

Document the learnings

Share your experiences internally, externally and with other agencies, ensuring that private information remains private, of course.   Every experience, every analysis becomes part of a bigger picture, engaging staff, volunteers and donors.  What better way to inform other people of your mission?

But where’s the spark?

The process outlined above may not sound like the more romantic view of innovation as a sudden inspiration that glows like a light bulb over an inventor’s head, but innovation usually starts in the details as a committed person searches for a new answer to an old problem.

Bill Kennedy is a chartered professional accountant and computer system implementation consultant.  To find out more about innovation in charity operations, subscribe to Bill’s newsletter at http://EnergizedAccounting.ca .