The New Solutions Council is currently in a very exciting place!  We are working on many different ideas, plans and projects that will help further our impact on the local community.  One of our biggest projects is working on our new Strategy & Investment Plan.  This plan will help guide our work in an even more concise way than we have experienced since the forming of our group in February 2009.  It will help us to assist local communities who have identified and implemented strategies in order to improve the various conditions that they face in a way that will achieve lasting change.  Innovation, a term that is used often in the corporate, non-profit and many other types of businesses, will be a key factor in how the New Solutions Council does it’s work as a group and how we are able to assist local community groups in their work.  In order to ensure that we are thoroughly familiar with the latest information regarding this widely used term innovation, we have begun to research various reports, studies and some of the best practices utilized by some of the most successful businesses and non-profit organizations successfully utilizing innovation in their work today!

One very informative report is Intentional Innovation – How Getting More systematic about Innovation Could Improve Philanthropy and Increase Social Impact by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. There is a framework detailed in this report that is key to any group’s attempt at innovation which includes the following parts: Setting the Conditions, Problem or Opportunity Definition, Idea Generation, Piloting & Prototyping and Diffusion & Scaling.  A very important piece that is mentioned several times throughout the report is that in order for innovation to work, an organization, group, company, etc. should create and continuously support an environment where their employees are encouraged to be innovative as part of their work expectations.  For instance, Google allows each employee no matter what their title or level in the organization, 20 percent of their time to work on new experiments.  In the non-profit world, helping new agencies or agencies with various challenges to applying for funding to be successful in a competitive application process, innovation can be utilized to address this challenge.   In Capetown, South Africa, the WHEAT Trust women’s foundation works to assist that area’s poorest rural women.  One of the challenges in accepting proposals for funding from the various women’s groups were that the applicants spoke many different languages, some of which were not spoken by the WHEAT Trust’s staff.  By using some key principles in innovation to address this challenge, the staff was able to be successful in accepting applications from a variety of interested groups. The applicants were able to call-in their proposals by leaving a detailed telephone message describing their project.  The message was then transcribed and put into written form to be reviewed by staff for funding decisions.  The solution used in this instance may sound like a no-brainer to many but there are many times that organizations overlook or do not think of some of the non-complicated innovation principles to meet the needs of their customers.

The New Solutions Council looks forward to using the many elements of innovation that we will continue to learn as we move throughout our work in the months and years to come!  Please continue to check out our blog post regularly to read about our work and find out the results of some of the exciting projects that we have had the pleasure of supporting in our local community!