My last post was about innovation, but the question arises, Do nonprofit need to worry about innovation? Corporations are in very competitive worlds where their customers will go elsewhere if they don’t provide the best, newest, or otherwise shiniest products and services.

But nonprofits?

In Play to Win (Jossey Bass, 2005) I argued that nonprofits also face economic imperatives from competition. But there is another reason for a commitment to constant innovation in most areas of nonprofit endeavor, and that is, quite simply, that what we’re doing now is not solving the problem.

There are always better ways to address social ills, which nonprofits are on the forefront of providing partial solutions for. So who better, indeed who else, is going to devote informed effort to finding better solutions?

No environmental group thinks it is solving global climate change and no homeless shelter thinks it is ending homelessness, so there is always room for new ideas. Innovation brought us the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the delivery of food to the poor through Food Stamps, and a thousand other social goods.

So yes, your nonprofit needs to innovate, in order to compete, but also in order to succeed.

Tags: nonprofit

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.