White House Digs Innovation
Social innovation now has an official place in the White House.
Social innovation now has an official place in the White House.
RAMP nurtures local inventors in India, Peru, and Indonesia.
Investors screen for entrepreneurial passion when making funding decisions.
Some of the brightest ideas for social change grow in the spaces between organizations and sectors. Yet few organizations have systems that make collaboration happen. To foster innovation, organizations need to develop places where they can come together and work creatively—that is, platforms for collaboration. In this article, a management expert identifies three kinds of collaboration platforms—exploration, experimentation, and execution—and then outlines what organizations can do to put these platforms to work for them.
Social entrepreneurship is one of the most alluring terms on the problem-solving landscape today. The question is not whether social entrepreneurship is a term in
good currency, but what it actually means.
The threat of animal habitat loss is one of the major issues in the environmental sustainability arena. In this audio interview by Sheela Sethuraman, Laurie Marker of the Cheetah Conservation Fund talks about a multi-pronged effort including habitat restoration, resource management education, and job creation to address that threat to cheetahs, in particular. She describes the creative measures she has taken to save cheetahs and improve the lives of the people who live near them.
Nonprofit management faces one of its biggest challenges in the arena of disaster relief. In this audio interview, Neal Denton, senior VP of government relations and strategic partnerships at the American Red Cross discusses the value of his organization's relationship to the Partnership for Disaster Response. He discusses plans for strengthening this relationship and the role of the private sector in disaster response.
MySpace, Flicker, YouTube, and Facebook are big brands and major movers in the commercial, social networking world. In this audio lecture recorded at the 2008 Nonprofit Management Institute, an event convened by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Jeff Patrick of Common Knowledge shares how nonprofits can use such tools—and customize their own—to capture constituencies and raise funds. He further shows where social networking is headed so that nonprofits can begin to incorporate it into their long-term horizons.
Research shows that spending time and money on others makes people happy—so why don't more people donate to or volunteer for nonprofits? In this audio lecture, sponsored by the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, Stanford marketing professor Jennifer Aaker offers insights into the phenomenon. She then turns those insights into lessons in nonprofit management that organizations can use to create compelling ways for more people to give financially and personally to the causes they care about.
To propel young folks to the polls, a political organization mixed Web 2.0 tools with social science savvy.