Ideas and Initiatives
Fostering innovation requires an understanding of and ability to shape the broader systems in which social institutions–such as schools or businesses–reside. True innovation results as a natural, emergent property facilitated by people who understand the relevant system and how it works and how it is connected to other systems, and know how to think about and enable the process of finding and adding value within that system and the broader social ecosystem.
Of course, a society includes a complex web of interconnected systems and subsystems. While it is often necessary to define system boundaries to help envision and develop innovations, we caution against bounding things too rigidly. In fact, one key source of innovation is the ability to see across system boundaries, to apply ideas from area to another, or indeed simply to dissolve the boundaries all together and look at things holistically.
For example, it is possible to consider economic development as related only to the systems of the money economy (businesses, workers, customers, banks, etc.). But the money economy is just a subsystem of a much broader social ecosystem that involves people (children and adults), educational and civic organizations, governments, churches, and so on. Economic development is really human development, and human development begins at the very earliest of ages.
We hope to help people make connections between systems, between ideas, and between each other. And we strongly believe that one of the most important connections we can make is the connection between our children and their future. We want children to be motivated to learn and to tie what they are learning into their vision and creation of the future. We have begun the Learn to Connect project with this idea in mind.
Business Consulting (in development)
We are currently developing an initiative designed to help businesses understand how to reassess their business model (and to innovate and “renovate”) in the context of “sustainability.” As part of this initiative we are looking at ways to promote employee motivation and productivity, to show businesses how to “co-create” strategy and the means of executing it, and in general how to move from habitual ways of thinking that may be stagnant to ways that can enliven a business and generate greater value.
"I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones."
–John Cage
Read about our approaches to Social Innovation: