Leaders and innovators in education need to do more than address falling test scores, crumbling facilities and a mounting teacher shortage; they need to address those problems in a world transformed by everything from advanced biotechnology to climate refugees.

Grantmakers for Education (GFE), a network of approximately 260 education funders, is working to build a common definition of innovation and to identify investments that can transform our education systems. As part of this initiative, educational innovation specialists from Collective Invention and KnowledgeWorks collaborated with GFE to design and document programs that enable grantmakers to step back from their typical funding procedures and consider what innovations can leverage the most change for learners.

The team utilized expertise in user-centric design thinking. Their process centered around a set of personas designed to help funders understand the how the education system will intersect with emerging global trends.

Meet the Learners of 2025

Imagine that you are Adila Tahawi a 15-year old first generation Arab-American from Minneapolis. Your father is teacher at an underfunded university, he makes ends meet by selling lectures and tutoring online.

You are home-schooled by your mother using a mix of e-learning content and in-person tutoring. You dream of one day going to college, or somewhere rich in intellectual collaboration and innovation, and you struggle daily with anti-Muslim sentiments in your community.

What resources do you need? What kind of education system is capable of providing you with those resources? What can funders do today to ensure that those resources are in place?

Imagine that you are JP Teaero, a 17-year old climate refugee from Kiribati living at a camp in Richmond, CA. NGOs have set up a makeshift education facility in your camp, but your elders are worried about the school assimilating away your already-fragile cultural heritage.

You are interested in pursuing climate science, a skill in growing demand, but are afraid that a refugee won’t be able to become, or be respected as, a scientist. A Federal grant has made first-generation cognitive implants available in your camp, and you are unsure whether to take the risk.

What resources do you need? What kind of education system is capable of providing you with those resources? What can funders do today to ensure that those resources are in place?

The Art of the Uncertain Future

By utilizing systems thinking and scenario planning methodologies, Collective invention and Knowledgeworks were able to lead discussion on how relatively certain trends (such as the existence of climate refugees) interact with trends that have axes of uncertainty (such as the widespread availability of on-demand educational content.) The result was a sophisticated dialogue about how the nation’s top funders can meet the emerging challenges of tomorrow.

The exercise brought a stream of insights. Grantmakers focused on the “need to be more nimble and less bureaucratic,” and to “listen on the ground from many perspectives.” Looking to the future also put the need for educational innovation in sharp focus. Grantmakers discussed creating a “education innovation labs and and venture funds,” while convening “business, funders, systems engineers, product managers, students and designers in… a product development cycle.”

A New Direction for Educational Grantmakers

In the end of the exercise, grantmakers determined that they would be successful in 2025 if…

1. We have fostered public will for new kinds of learning and new learning outcomes.
2. We have advocated policy that enables new kinds of learning and new learning outcomes.
3. We have innovated funding mechanisms to enable greater choice, equity, and/or new learning models.
4. We have identified new forms of governance.
5. We have fostered personalized learning in a community context.
6. We have defined new critical skills and knowledge.
7. We have prototyped and/or scaled new models for learning.
8. We have delivered on the promise of digital media.
9. We have reimagined assessments for (and of) learning.
10. We have framed a research agenda for a new world for learning.

Two new briefs offer further insight into these efforts. Innovation in Education: Redesigning the Delivery System of Education in America documents how funders at GFE’s April 2010 member briefing used three key approaches—systems thinking, design thinking and scenario thinking—to understand what grantmakers can do to transform education systems. Learning 2025 summarizes themes from a working meeting in which a small group of funders mapped their investments in next generation learning strategies.

In the past two decades, we’ve seen seen explosive growth in bio-, info-, and nano-technologies. But in many respects our social structures–in education, health, and government itself–have not kept pace. While the potential and need for social progress is now greater than ever, its record in recent years has lagged. Institutionalized structures and practices that reward waste and pollution have caused massive environmental destruction. The concentration and deregulation of financial power has led to worldwide economic crisis. Billions of children and adults who could contribute to future progress are malnourished and poorly educated. Fortunately, we believe that a new force for social innovation is being born, one that we call “collective invention.”

For the full text of the manifesto, click here. To sign up for email delivery of our bulletin, please go to our homepage and sign up in the upper right corner.

Many people have said this before, notably Peter Drucker, who argued the case for innovation for several decades, but organizations that do not innovate as part of their regular cycle of business will stagnate internally, lose touch with their markets – current and potential, and ultimately fail.

However, as those of us who work in the innovation space know, it has been hard for some organizations to see the need to innovate when times have been good, and they have been achieving success via traditional channels.  Innovation, by definition leading to something new and emergent, is hard to measure. Some worry about an uncontrollable, resource hungry, process, without understanding the disciplines of innovation. Others worry about a rise in beanbag futures, seeing their previously diligent employees suddenly wearing casual clothes, lying around on comfortable furniture, and, in dreaming up the future, losing sight of the core business.

Current times are forcing changes upon us. As ever, we have more choices than we think we do. We can slip into fear as individuals, retrenchment as organizations, and isolationism as nations – requiring the creation of scapegoats, and the loss of rights and liberties. Or, we can use our creativity, skills and generosity to change the ways in which we do business, consume our resources, share our wealth and our responsibilities as problem-solvers.

The capacity to innovate is the capacity to adapt swiftly to changing circumstances whilst also moving out to meet and co-create the future. It’s the capacity to work simultaneously on today, tomorrow, and ten, twenty, thirty, one hundred years out. (Or more, see www.longnow.org). And in working in multiple time frames, the capacity to bring the paradigms of the future back to the work of now, rather than carrying the paradigms of now everywhere as the unconscious filters of our experience.

Fiona Hovenden is an ethnographer and partner at Collective Invention, working on change, social research, prototyping, and social influences on the design and use of technologies