November 8, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Below is the third part of my interview with Ben Cameron, program director for the arts at Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, about a program administered by Nonprofit Finance Fund and financed by Duke to help arts groups. (Read the first and second installments.)
Through the multiyear “Leading for the Future” project, Nonprofit Finance Fund is directing more than $10-million in capital from the foundation to 10 performing-arts organizations. The goal is to give them the flexibility to test new ideas, explore new business approaches, resist distraction, and even risk failure.
Below, Mr. Cameron shares his thoughts on the lessons he’s learned during the program’s first year. Over the coming days, we’ll post additional questions and answers from him about this program. We hope you’ll contribute your thoughts to the conversation, too.
Creativity and passion are abundant in the nonprofit world, particularly among arts groups. What lessons have you learned about innovation generally and the role of money in the innovation process specifically?
Richard Evans, president of EMC Arts, which works to help drive innovation in the arts, defines organizational innovation as instances of change that (1) result from a shift in underlying assumptions, (2) are discontinuous from previous practices, and (3) provide new pathways to fulfilling mission. We have found this definition incredibly useful.
In our experience at Duke, we’ve learned a few things about successful innovation.
First, the optimal innovation team is composed of a diverse group of individuals who are focused on solving a common set of problems—diverse in age, in expertise, in tenure or tie to the organization, in culture. In trying to crack open a problem in a new way, new perspectives are definitely needed. When groups bring in people who aren’t as closely tied to the organization as existing staff, incredibly insightful questions are often asked.
Andrew Zolli, curator at the annual mass-media and technology conference PopTech and an expert in global innovation, says that successful innovators focus on base hits, not home runs. Because we know that innovation is expensive and takes significant time (as the author Jim Collins has noted, citing four years as the average period needed for significant organizational change), our program made seven-figure, five-year grants to 10 organizations—a bold move.
What we did not fully appreciate at the time was the paralyzing power of such significant funds. Our own language—“organizational transformation”—probably heightened this sense of paralysis. Grantees in some cases found themselves shouldering burdens of expectations and self-defined objectives of changing the world rather than simply taking a first step—i.e., focusing on the base hit, rather than the home run.
We noticed recently that a number of grant-making programs—including our own—were designed to help organizations launch, without additional support to sustain them. As a result, we recently started a new initiative, “Continuing Innovation,” which offers an additional 18 months of support to a select cohort of prior grantees to help them continue their innovative journey.
