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