How to innovate towards positive impact

First – is your eye on the right prize?

Innovation has propelled humankind forward for centuries. But how we see innovators and innovation has evolved. The focus or ‘lens’ we put around innovation will determine where we put our funding, our ideas, our energy – and whether or not these resources will be trained on some of the great issues of our time.

In the early days of innovation as we know it, the focus was on the innovator, the ‘hero’, and the power of innovation. Over time this focus has evolved. Those seeking to support, grow and ‘do’ innovation have focused on the type, scale, process, contexts and direction of innovation.

Now we’re seeing a return of focus on the IMPACT of the innovation. ‘Mission’ or ‘Challenge’-led innovation, which is growing in popularity, focuses on systems transformation and addressing the grand challenges of our time instead of simply creating innovation heroes and increasing the wealth of the few.

This framing of your innovation is particularly important context when you’re thinking about the conditions and ecosystem that will best support innovation towards ending ‘wicked’ problems like climate change, biodiversity loss or inequality.

 

11 Conditions to support Innovation for Impact

Now that you’re thinking about innovating towards some of the grand challenges of our time, examine how many of these key contextual conditions you have in place.

Generally, the view is the more of these conditions that are evident and the more robust they are, the more effective your enabling ecosystem will be.

These are often less-tangible factors, but no less important in making innovation ‘work’.

1. Purpose: A goal or challenge that guides vision and innovation can help to reduce barriers, galvanise focus and attract resource.
2. Capacity to Experiment: Capacity, support and mandate to experiment, test, protype and iterate.
3. Appetite for Change: Openness and appetite for change and learning, plus tenacity to make it happen.
4. Learning is Valued: Inquiry, learning and risk taking is valued and appreciated and a culture of safe-to-fail supports this.
5. Autonomy and Constraints: A balance of autonomy to develop ideas, and enabling constraints that support innovation are present.
6. Access to Tools and Skills: Access to a diversity of tools plus the skills, training and capability needed to use them to maximum effect.
7. Diverse Perspectives: Diversity of stakeholders and inputs and exposure to diverse perspectives are encouraged and celebrated.
8. Collaborative and Flexible Spaces: Opportunities for collaboration through flexible spaces, places or platforms.
9. Robust Feedback: Access to regular, robust and relevant feedback and the capability and capacity to give and receive such feedback.
10. Right Resources: Right amount and right timing of resources (capital, investment, human resources) over the course of the innovation process.
11. Access to Prior Learning: Access to learnings about what has worked previously, what hasn’t, and a willingness to learn the lessons.

There can be a temptation to think you need the full set of these conditions, but that’s not the case. Think about which combination you could cultivate that might suit your context. It’s also important to acknowledge that mindsets and cultural conditions like these develop over time, experimentation is key, and they require intentional work.

11 Elements of an Impact Innovation Ecosystem

When you’re confident there are enough enabling conditions in place, it’s time to turn your attention to tangible initiatives and infrastructure elements that can support and enable innovation for impact.

While you’ll see a couple of overlaps with the above conditions – when thinking about the conditions we need, the access issues are highlighted - here we’re focusing on the infrastructure itself.

1. Research and Impact Evaluation: Competitive and prosperous industries and economies invest in research, benchmarking and impact measurement. This helps to improve what we do and how we do it, enables learning, and sharing of what impact the innovation process itself has, and what impact the innovative product, service or process has, as it is implemented.
2. Co-working, Design and Working Spaces: Spaces where people and/or organisations can work together enable exchange of ideas, and also shared services, sharing of equipment, and easier access to available services and supports.
3. Technical Advice, Support and Training: On-the-job advice, support and training designed by and for impact innovators – focusing on both process and the business of innovation: how to deepen impact, grow viability and ensure sustainability. This can involve bespoke capability building, mentoring, coaching and/or training.
4. Market Development Opportunities: Sometimes particular interventions need to happen for markets to develop or grow (e.g. impact procurement has enabled social and environmental outcomes to be included in decision-making about procurement contracts). This in turn can support and direct innovation towards deeper impacts.
5. Finance, Investment and Funding: Impact innovation requires a range of different forms of investment funding and finance. The ‘right type’ depends on the size, risk, profit, potential and stage of development. More diverse and varied financial options could support broader and deeper impact innovation ecosystems.
6. Labs and Spaces to Experiment: Labs engage diverse groups of people to intentionally test, innovate and learn how we might address specific social, economic or environmental challenges. They are experimental in their approach to tackling issues, and they seek to test solutions that are practical, and applied to real-life.
7. Formal Education Opportunities: Formal education offered in institutions like universities or colleges can provide education for impact innovators and for other stakeholders helping build the conditions for a thriving and healthy impact ecosystem. Ongoing education can underpin rigour and development of impact across an ecosystem.
8. Networks and Networking Opportunities: Networks can open opportunities and help impact innovators to connect with peers, experts, mentors and partners. Networking can happen through events, communities of practice, online social networking platforms or impact-focused intermediaries.
9. Policy and Government Support: Policies that encourage and promote impact innovation can help catalyse, grow and spread solutions. Policy can support market development, encourage further innovation, remove barriers, offer funding at critical points, or enable new legal forms or investment pathways. Government can also help to implement and spread impact innovations.
10. Appropriate Legal Structures and Supports: New enterprises, organisations or initiatives that result from impact innovation often have to adopt a specific legal form. This provides rules for their operations and protects their mission. It can also enable tax deductibility or credits. Often advice is needed to make decisions about the most appropriate form to achieve particular objectives.
11. Incubators and Accelerators: Programs and processes (and sometimes spaces) that can help support and accelerate the development, spread and growth of impact innovation. Incubators connect innovators to specialized supports, and accelerators link innovators to networks, investors and opportunities for deeper impact and growth.

Once again, it’s not a requirement to have all of this in your impact innovation ecosystem. We suggest a useful way of thinking about the elements is as different entry points for enabling work, each of which can be built on over time and through the efforts of different actors within an ecosystem. The elements can be engaged with together or separately, in different combinations, and with ‘back-and-forth’ between — as suits different contexts and the resources available at the time. In other words, do not be deterred from starting where you are!

 

About the author

Ingrid Burkett is an MBA Professor at Griffith University and the Co-Director of The Yunus Centre, Griffith University’s Impact Innovation Centre, which is dedicated to accelerating transitions to regenerative and distributive economies.

To connect with Ingrid or see more about her work, visit Ingrid’s LinkedIn page. 

 

More business leadership resources

Innovation for Impact is one of the subjects taught in the Griffith MBA. Ranked as the world’s #1 most sustainable MBA, the Griffith University MBA has been successfully developing leaders like no others for over a decade. Leaders who use their skills, experience and integrity to shape a better world, both personally and professionally.   

Find out more about responsible leadership and the Griffith MBA at griffith.edu.au/mba 

And for more articles on navigating change and creating positive, regenerative impact, visit the Griffith University Y Impact blog.