September 30, 2012 | Read Time: 7 minutes
Creating a curriculum to help low-income students plan what they’re going to do after high school—and ideally pursue higher education—was a major milestone for College Summit, a nonprofit in Washington. But the monthslong effort was exhausting for the nonprofit’s program staff members, who toiled long hours on top of their regular responsibilities.
Now as it embarks on a new project, the charity is taking a different approach. It’s testing ways to increase the number of students served by working with other education groups. This time, the nonprofit’s new chief innovation officer and her team will do the heavy lifting, while tapping the program staff’s knowledge.
The innovation team makes it easier for the charity’s other employees to embrace new ideas wholeheartedly without fear of being swamped with extra work, says J.B. Schramm, College Summit’s chief executive: “People are still very engaged, but now they get to be engaged more through their expertise and less through their brawn.”
Taking a page from the playbooks of corporations, a small but growing number of charities are hiring chief innovation officers and starting innovation teams as a way to be more deliberate and disciplined in how they test new ideas and put them in place.
Adding new positions in a tough economy may seem counterintuitive. But organizations point to the changing financial landscape, especially when it comes to government money, as one of the chief reasons for investing in innovation.
“We’re in an environment where it’s innovate or die,” says Amelia Franck Meyer, chief executive of Anu Family Services, a child-welfare charity in Hudson, Wis.
At large nonprofits with lots of chapters, chief innovation officers look for new ideas that are making an impact at the local level and work to expand them across the organization. Some innovation officers are charged with figuring out how to use the latest research to improve services for clients, while others, together with their deputies, help organizations respond quickly to new opportunities.
Says Mr. Schramm: “Having the innovation team allows a place for new ideas to go when they aren’t ready for prime time yet.”
Abdicating Responsibility
Not everyone, however, is convinced that hiring a chief innovation officer is the best way to drive organizational change in the nonprofit world.
“My fear has always been if you put one person in charge of innovation, everybody else starts to abdicate their responsibility to that one person,” says Darell Hammond, chief executive of KaBoom, a charity that promotes the building of playgrounds.
Mr. Hammond says he wants everyone in the organization to look for better ways of doing things and to run with their ideas, rather than feeling it’s enough to forward an interesting article to the person in charge of innovation. “I want them to feel an obligation, a sense of responsibility,” he says.
‘Crisis-Driven’ Environment
Finding new ways to help children in a difficult financial environment is a key reason Anu Family Services has a chief innovation officer.
Government reimbursements cover only about half of what the organization spends to provide services to children in foster care, she says. With money tight, the group has to look for new ways of doing things if it wants to maintain the quality of its programs. But carving out the time to chart a new course is difficult, especially given what Ms. Franck Meyer calls the “crisis-driven” nature of the organization’s work.
Having a chief innovation officer means someone can step back from day-to-day concerns to look at ways to streamline the group’s operations and incorporate new research findings into its treatment programs, says Ms. Franck Meyer: “It’s stuff that people wish they had time to do.”
Anu’s chief innovation officer led the charity’s adoption of a new approach, which draws on trauma research, to help the children it serves examine their feelings of grief and loss as they experience them, rather than just during weekly counseling sessions. The new method meant 30 hours of training for the group’s social workers and foster parents, but the nonprofit thinks that it will help the kids heal and forge new ties more easily.
Says Ms. Franck Meyer: “People don’t experience trauma or grieve their losses at 2 o’clock on Tuesday when they’re in therapy.”
Innovation experts who focus on the nonprofit world have mixed feelings about the new crop of chief innovation officers. On the one hand, they say, hiring an innovation officer can help charities make new ideas a priority. But they warn that creating a new position is not enough by itself to transform a group’s culture.
“Innovation takes time, and if people in an organization aren’t focused on it, then they won’t necessarily do it,” says Michael Horn, co-founder of the Innosight Institute, a nonprofit think tank. “So if the chief innovation officer is someone who can get people in an organization to really focus on it and make it part of their jobs, that can be really valuable.”
But he worries that some groups underestimate what it takes to reinvent the way an organization pursues its mission.
“A big potential drawback is feeling like we’ve done the innovation thing now that we have someone who’s in charge of it, and just assuming that that will happen,” says Mr. Horn. “It really takes teams. It takes focus from the CEO level to be able to redeploy resources and make tough decisions.”
‘Spinning in Circles’
Clear goals can also help. Officials at the Corporation for Supportive Housing say such clarity has been central to its innovations and research team’s success.
For the last three years, the charity has tested programs designed to figure out if providing people with low-cost housing and social services—the group’s approach to fighting chronic homelessness—can be effectively applied to other situations, such as to prevent former prisoners from committing another crime and going back to jail.
The experiments, led by the innovations and research team, have gained the notice of both foundations and policy makers. Last year the charity won a $2.3-million grant from the federal Social Innovation Fund to test whether a mix of housing and social services can reduce health-care costs incurred by homeless Medicaid patients with chronic illnesses.
Without well-defined parameters, says Richard Cho, director of innovations and research, “we could have ended up spinning in circles and chasing a lot of things that weren’t actually all that innovative.”
Charity leaders say it’s important that all employees understand why the organization is starting an innovation team and how it will fit into the existing hierarchy. Good communication, they say, can prevent turf battles and hurt feelings.
Five years ago, Mercy Corps created its social-innovation team to test new approaches to international-development work, with many of the group’s projects focusing on technology and finance. One of its most important projects: overseeing the creation of a wholesale bank for microfinance institutions in Indonesia that helps the groups serve more clients.
Early on, leadership’s very vocal excitement about the social innovations team caused tension with program staff members, says Neal Keny-Guyer, head of Mercy Corps.
“Folks who had been slogging it out on the front lines in some of the toughest places suddenly felt devalued,” he says. “We had to work hard to say, ‘Hey, no, all the work is still valuable.’”
Letting Go
One of the challenges nonprofits face is figuring out when to turn a fledgling idea the innovation team has nurtured over to another department to run.
Innovation teams are designed to focus primarily on new ideas—so it doesn’t make sense to have them tied up in day-to-day operations, says Neil Nicoll, chief executive of the Y.
But for innovation staff members, the hand-off can be tough, he says. “We’re all human beings,” Mr. Nicoll says. “We like to hold on to our successes.”
Boston Children’s Hospital takes a different approach with its innovation group. Instead of trying to create change itself, the group works to create a culture of experimentation throughout the institution and to nurture the ideas of others.
The monthly innovators’ forums the hospital has held for the last two years have featured doctors talking about their work, including a urological surgeon who is developing an artificial kidney, as well as the head of parking describing his efforts to improve valet-parking service for patients.
The group also oversees a fund that provides early support for innovation in patient care, a software-development program, and a hospital committee investigating ways to use technology to provide remote patient care.
“We tend not to be the superstar innovators,” says Naomi Fried, the hospital’s chief innovation officer. “We really are there to help other people move their ideas forward.”
