Innovation is all the rage. In this complimentary webinar, academic scholars and nonprofit leaders Seelos, Mair, May, and Joseph will examine innovation as an organizational process, looking at the ingredients needed to make the process productive as well as the pathologies that if not addressed can make it derail. The webinar will examine questions such as: How is innovation triggered and enacted? Can organizations get better at innovation over time? What role do stakeholders and governance play in stimulating or stifling innovation? Since the value of innovation lies in an organization’s ability to scale up its outcomes, the presenters will also reflect on the important balance that must be struck between innovating and scaling up.
Our on-demand SSIR Live! webinars are offered every 4-6 weeks, and feature the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s most provocative and important topics. The registration fee is $49 per 2011-2014 webinar, or $19 per 2009/2010 webinar, and includes on-demand access for 12 months—so if you missed the live presentation, you can still register and view it at your convenience.
Join us to explore how to address the next phase in the collective impact dialogue, complexity, and create an intentional process that allows for effective solutions. John Kania, coauthor of SSIR’s Embracing Emergence: How Collective Impact Addresses Complexity, will discuss this next phase and define “emergence,” a term that describes events that are unpredictable and which no one organization or individual can control. He will be joined by Blair Taylor, who shares from experience the implications of complexity and emergence in Memphis Fast Forward’s work, and Mark Cabaj, who will cover developmental evaluation in collective impact. This lively discussion will focus on why collective impact is a relevant approach for complex problems and how leaders of successful collective impact initiatives have embraced a new way of collectively seeing, learning and doing that marries emergent solutions with intentional outcomes. The webinar will help participants understand the implications of complexity and emergence in their work and how developmental evaluation can advance collective learning to reach better and more robust outcomes.
To become more effective, nonprofits and foundations are turning to various sources for advice. Some look to experts, others turn to crowdsourcing. Experts and crowds can produce valuable insights, but too often nonprofits and funders ignore the constituents who matter most, the intended beneficiaries. Join Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan, and Valerie Threlfall as they discuss the reasons why surveying beneficiaries is so important, how the feedback can be used, and some of the challenges to doing this and how to overcome them. They will also provide real-world examples of organizations that are effectively surveying beneficiaries, including their own experience trying to elicit the voices of high school students through YouthTruth, a nonprofit that the three of them co-founded. YouthTruth has gathered feedback from close to 150,000 students across the United States.
Social Impact Bonds increasingly are being adopted with the idea that one way to fund successful social service programs is to raise capital from private investors. Investors are repaid through the savings a government accrues if a preventative program, such as one that reduces recidivism or keeps children out of foster care, succeeds in achieving its targets. Join Palandjian and Shah as they explore the early days of Social Impact Bonds in the United States, why they are promising, and the various risks they present. This webinar is ideal for any and all stakeholders in the nonprofit, government, or corporate sectors who seek to know more about Social Impact Bonds and alternative financing for social service programs.