Years ago I invited Andrew Hargadon, a professor at UC Davis, to speak at a conference I was hosting. Hargadon’s expertise is innovation and entrepreneurship in the business world, but I thought then and now that his theories apply equally well to the charitable sector.
Innovation, he claims, doesn’t come from a genius thinking up grand thoughts alone in a room. More often good ideas bubble up from a group of diverse people working in common cause. They combine existing ideas with new ones, then take the most promising to scale.
That’s what often took place in Thomas Edison’s famous lab in New Jersey. Mechanics, engineers, scientists, tradesmen and others sat side-by-side on long wooden workbenches. They tinkered with each other’s inventions, solved each other’s problems. Their lab ultimately produced over 1,000 US patents – the most prolific inventors ever. It still serves as the prototype for modern R&D labs.
Other examples of innovative thinking come from Henry Ford and his team. They studied the sewing machine, meat packing industry, and Campbell Soup and then came up with the idea for the assembly line. Then there’s Steve Jobs and the whiz kids at Apple who combined existing technology from Sony and elsewhere to craft the iPod. In the first decade after the iPod’s release, people bought a resounding 300 million of them.
In today’s fast-paced world, organizations working in the social good space would do well to embrace Hargadon’s theory of innovation. No one has all the answers to society’s problems of course, but an excellent starting point involves gathering together people with different backgrounds, skill sets, and experiences. Doing so has the potential to unleash differing perspectives and new ways of thinking as well as igniting breakthrough solutions for the common good.
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