ASE09: Social Innovation Fund - Go Niche!

There is a thriving conversation going on in the "Replicate" working session about how the government should approach the new Social Innovation Fund. Facilitated by Andrew Wolk and Colleen Ebinger from Rootcause and Susannah Washburn from the Corporation for National and Community Service, the audience has been asked about what they would like to see from the $50 million fund.

My arguement is to go extremely niche, and be ruthless about focusing on getting something - preferably something that no one else does - right. There is a temptation I think we all feel to see a new, exciting, governement fund, and to quickly load every idea we've ever had for how the governement could support the nonprofit sector.

The reality is that if we do that, we risk adding just another layer of bureaucracy. If I'm running this, what I want to identify is:

1. What are the specific funding gaps it wants to meet? A funding gap can be based on a specific type of organization that often loses out, an actual amount of funding that tends to be lacking, or funding that rewards a specific type of behavior we'd like to see - such as cross-organization or cross-sector collaboration.
2. How narrowly are we going to define innovation? The fund needs to be 100% clear on the nature of the innovation it seeks to promote. We need to be clear on this or else it becomes muddled fast?
3. How wide do we cast the first net? The first fund is a clear number $50. That's a real testing pool, and I think that focusing on a very specific set of priorities is key.

These are, I'm sure, the questions that the folks constructing this have been thinking through. They're just the questions I don't know about yet.

If it's me, I go incredibly niche. I think about this should be treated as an extremely high risk pool that works to identify truly disruptive innovation. We're not talking about small incremental changes, but experimenting with things that could up-end entire fields and processes as they exist. And I probably focus on fields where there's high potential for technology to dramatically change things, like medical health records.

I say this not to undermine any other approaches to making change. There are dozens of types of nonprofits and all of them have a place. My argument is just that this is a huge opportunity for experimentation, and we should focus on using that sandbox to it's fullest creative capacity.

Update: Andrew Wolk just really hammered the point home that this fund will be underutilized if it's not a pathway for integration with government policy. It can't just be, according to him (and I think I agree) just another funder in the nonprofit ecosystem; it has to leverage it's unique asset, which is it's relationship with government bodies who can learn from it and incorporate new ideas.