ARPA-ED might just succeed because the education system is in a rare moment of alignment around the prospect of innovation. The issue is building consensus across party lines, bringing President Obama and Republican ex-Governor Jeb Bush together for a recent press conference in Miami. The NEA is also on board, stating that “the technology environment of today’s public schools should match the tools … of work and civic life that students will encounter after graduation.” Wind of this alignment has reached the private sector, where investors are predicting a 28% annual growth rate in the K-12 educational technology market:

There is no question that a shift is happening. Now ARPA-ED and other innovators in the education space must face the daunting challenge of imagining what that shift might look like. As Republicans, Democrats, superintendents and teachers unions all gingerly approach the notion of radical change, they each project radically different images of what that change will look like. Some envision e-schools that can deliver high-quality learning at a fraction of the current cost, others imagine teachers trained to facilitate fully customized learning experiences through technology, others just want graduates ready to compete in the global economy of the 21st century. These competing visions of the future, though often fundamentally compatible, can layer on top of innovation until it is smothered.

Whether ARPA-ED succeeds or fails will ultimately depend not on its skill at ed-tech wizardry, but on its ability to combine these visions into a unified whole. It’s a daunting challenge, especially because more people still need to be invited to the table. Parents need to be given a voice. So do kids, so do teachers on the ground, so do the 21st century industries that will be hiring after graduation. Effective innovation, especially in systems as complex as education, is less about great edtech and more about the conditions that allow it to be developed – overall it is about the ability to construct multistakeholder innovation systems.

Making Innovation Systems Work

Collective Invention’s ethnographer, Fiona Hovenden, has been working with the Stupski Foundation to study how these innovation systems are being constructed in schools and communities across the country. In every case successful innovation networks start by generating a shared vision of the future, often distilled as profiles of the future graduates that the community wants its schools to foster. These profiles can trigger a phase change: they get people to stop worrying about what everyone else will accept and start pushing for what everyone else aspires to.

Once stakeholders have been aligned, a rich and complicated conversation needs to take place. Teachers, superintendents, and entrepreneurs all need to become adroit in the use of innovation techniques that they can take back to their workplaces and classrooms. Ideas need to be visualized, prototypes need to be played with, and new relationships need to form between people and between ideas. Much of this process can and should happen online, but the most powerful components also require a physical meeting place with crowded whiteboards and a busy front door.

Future personas and innovation hubs. Both tools come from a rich history of strategic innovation that should be required reading for innovators in education.

Future Personas

In the late 70s, early creators of business software became frustrated at how teams of designers would often become divided over conflicting visions of a finished product. They found that illustrating and even play-acting a set of concrete set of user personas helped designers step back from their own opinions and come to a consensus around what was best for the end user.

But why profile graduates from the future, rather than graduates today? The answer may lie in the work of the Global Business Network (GBN), which found that articulating likely scenarios of the future had a curious affect on entrenched bureaucracies. Telling stories about likely future scenarios and asking people to plan for them makes change seem inevitable rather than apocalyptic. At Collective Invention we combine macro scenarios with the micro-stories of future personas. Thought leaders in education have already begun to combine these two tactics. Future personas are already being used effectively by the nation’s top educational grantmakers and by top-performing local innovators.

Innovation Hubs

Innovation hubs have a their own rich history, though they have generally been applied to technical rather than social challenges. At centers like XEROX PARC innovators laid the foundation for modern computing and carried around iPad prototypes 40 years ahead of schedule. More recently, innovation centers have been popping up in other social arenas. Healthcare-focused Innovation Center Denmark has proven so successful that it has opened up hubs in Silicon Valley and Shanghai. The concept of ARPA-ED springs from this lineage, and educational innovators should be sure to look across sectors for best practices in making these hubs effective.

What does success look like?

Where could this catalytic moment in education lead? It might start with a set of structured conversations about what we want the graduates of 2025 and 2050 to be able to do in the world. These conversations need to tap into our highest aspirations for our kids and for the communities that they’ll be defining. A struggling mom in LA will be able to tell her story in a place where someone’s listening, where she sees how her hopes overlap with those of her kid’s teachers, the district superintendent, legislators from both sides of the aisle. She’ll feel like the education system is actually changing, and like she and her kid are a part of that change.

Once she’s invested, she’ll plug into regular conversations about how her daughter’s education is transforming for the better. She’ll make friends not just with her daughter’s teacher, but with an entrepreneur who’s prototyping a groundbreaking education game and with a representative from the nanotech conglomerate that would like to hire her daughter when she graduates from college.

Truly groundbreaking changes in education aren’t going to come from highly-paid experts at ARPA-ED, they’re going to come out of these sorts of friendships. Our best hope may just be to build an innovation system that invites everyone to the table and to invite them to dream together.

Strategic and affiliate partnerships are not new in business, but there are particular ways in which the challenges and opportunities of the current time make new demands on leaders. Increased knowledge and connectivity show us more of the complexity in the problems we want to solve, the goods and services we want to create, and in the relationships between producers and consumers, social activists and beneficiaries, including the blurring of those lines. However, they also show us how concerted collective creativity and actions can prove a match for that complexity. No one person, organization, or government will solve the global economic problems, just as no one agency or type of intervention will solve a social problem such as homelessness. For leaders this provides both a requirement and an opportunity, to enter the bigger picture and embrace the generosity of cooperation.

Perceiving new value

A decrease in the kinds of resources – capital and markets – that for-profit and non-profit organizations have become used to, leads to intensified competition. Partnerships have to demonstrate some higher order value – the activation of a social movement, increased learning, better service, new potentials, the opportunity to work on larger problems than a single organization could tackle alone. A leader has to perceive and understand that value, and then persuade others, internal and external, to pursue it, even at the expense of the old norms of competition.

Innovating chains and networks

Globalization will not stop, despite recession and consequent tendencies towards protectionism. In an inter-connected world, where current trends suggest that the ethical provenance of goods and services will increase in importance, partnerships can be a way of ensuring that provenance, as well as innovating along supply and distribution chains, and throughout networks. Through partners we can have knowledge of each stage of the chain, or node in the network. That knowledge creates a collective responsibility, and also the opportunity for collective creativity.

Clarity

Partnering requires absolute clarity about an organization’s own area of work and sphere of influence. In many ways this becomes easier in times of straitened circumstances as organizations scale back to core business, and partnerships become a way of extending services. The difficulty then is to continue to innovate, in order to cultivate and develop the core business, in such a way that viable partnerships aren’t threatened. Pursuing joint ventures is one way to do this, although it adds complexity, especially in calculating the contribution of intangible assets. It also catalyzes the issues of power and control.

Power and Control

Probably the hardest part of collaboration for organizations is working out the respective areas and levels of control, and the decision-making processes to be used. As a baseline, good practices around this require that leaders of each organization come together with a genuine desire to share control and responsibility, to shift into being a part of a larger whole, rather than remaining the whole of a smaller part. It requires the ability to hold uncertainties in a spirit of curiosity and optimism, to stay loyal to earlier agreements about decision-making without being uncritical, and to act swiftly once decisions have been taken.

Managing Dilemmas

In the work of social innovation the problems tackled are complex and imbued with tensions. They are embedded in various systems, and within and between those systems, subject to competing agendas; they require innovation yet inhibit experiment; they demonstrate compelling overt symptoms and causes, and hold quieter, more covert, but equally influential ones as well. Scalable solutions require the concerted actions of policy-makers, leaders, program managers, field workers and venture funds, as well as the skills of top-sight, insight, foresight and know-how.

Join the conversation

One of the many leadership dilemmas around partnering is currently up on our Leadership Forum. If you’d like to join the conversation please click here.

To discuss partnering as it pertains to collective invention, join the discussion here.

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.

“I’m just not going to believe it’s all hopeless” said our host at dinner tonight at the New Media Consortium’s (www.nmc.org) Advisory Group on K-12 education and technology. This is a mix of people assembled to think about K-12 education and new technologies at a time when it’s pretty difficult to think about anything at all without mulling over the general state of the world.

(The lunatic irony of it all is captured in these contrasts: this week, while Citigroup considered whether to take receipt of a $45,000,000 private aircraft for 12 at the same time they take receipt of their $45,000,000,000 portion of the Federal bailout package, we facilitated community meetings in a major CA school district where the only funds not frozen are being used to purchase toilet paper. Taxpaying families are asking “where’s our bailout?” while their neighborhood schools close, and now we’re here trying to have a meaningful conversation about technology’s promise for K-12.)

The crazy thing is that all we can productively do is to cultivate optimism at the very moment we have objective reasons to despair. Hopefulness seems naïve, almost impudent in the face of what’s going on these days, and yet it’s the backbone of innovation—the persistent feeling that you’re on the verge of something better, the intermittent glimpse of something brilliant ahead, and the niggling sense that it’s within your capacity to be an agent of that brilliance in the world.

The Skoll Foundation’s headlines of the future remind us of the possibilities:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was also struck some time ago by Jamais Cascio’s piece at Open the Future on “super-empowered, hopeful individuals”.” http://www.openthefuture.com/2008/03/superempowered_hopeful_individ.html). In our work at Collective Invention, we have observed that transformative ideas emerge at the nexus of the hopeful individual (even in grim circumstances) and the intelligent group. This zeitgeist is manifested in Ashoka’s concept that “everyone is a change-maker” and their support of group entrepreneurship (http://www.ashoka.org/promote). Janet Rae-Dupree’s New York Times article on the lone innovator and “brainpower in numbers” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/business/07unbox.html?_r=1&em also captures this nicely.

My partners and I believe that a new force for social innovation is being born, and that’s what we call “collective invention.” We believe that there are a set of known practices that tend to support transformative innovation, that they are as likely as any others to help us solve seemingly intractable social problems, and that these practices are useful both to individuals and in groups. In coming posts and in our CI bulletins (sign up on our homepage at www.collectiveinvention.com) we’ll tease out the practices, principles and precepts that support social innovation. Some are are drawn from design, some from the social sciences, and all of them are born out by our experience working with individuals and groups on complex problems over the years. I’ll be sharing them here because I’m interested in your thoughts, your experiences and perspectives, and because at the end of the day—like my colleague at dinner tonight—I’m thinking we have cause to be hopeful. Maybe the fact that we’re facing so many challenges simultaneously gives us a chance to show ourselves that we actually do know what to do to promote social innovation, and how to do it, after all

Meanwhile, a few interesting reference points for innovation in technology in education:

http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/01/mapping_maps.html

http://www.projectknect.org/Project%20K-Nect/Home.html

http://www.scicentr.org/Explore/VirtualWorlds/

Click here to view the embedded video.

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