Month: December 2021

Lesson of the month is ‘simplicity’. However big and complicated something is, pulling out the simplest small part of it is the fastest way to progress. Sometimes things like complicated just because they aren’t well coordinated. Simplification makes coordination easier too.

Contributing to the digital transformation of the charity sector

It’s been a interesting month of moving from definition to the development work. I always know that the transition is never straightforward and clean cut like all the models show but I still get slightly surprised by it. Project phases are an illusion.

I didn’t get onto the work I was expecting/hoping to do around the continuous improvement model for the product but I did progress the decision around the use of virtual meetings platform. And as always, I did lots of other things.

I resigned from my role at the Prince’s Trust and am joining RNID as a Product Lead.

Learning about innovation, technology, product and design

I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of innovat100n.com. FutureSkills.info is a more interesting idea with better defined audience and at least some idea for a potential marketing plan, and I’ve already made more progress than I ever did with writing a hundred essays about innovation.

I’ve enjoyed writing the Irregular Ideas newsletter for the past five weeks. Being a newsletter rather than blog posts adds some constraints which I think/hope are improving my writing and I like that it has a broad topic.

I didn’t add any more stiles as NFT’s. Just wasn’t a priority. It would be nice to get all of my stiles on Opensea but it’s very time-consuming I don’t know what I’ll do with them once they’re on there.

I did a bit of research into DAO’s for future.charity but not enough to really progress the idea. There is still something really interesting to explore there but it’s big and messy and amorphous and very uncertain.

I wrote quite a few blog posts for NoBloPoMo but not the full thirty I was intending too. I decided to refocus on other projects.

Didn’t do any work on Adjacencies and losing a bit of interest in it.

I finished the Foundations of Humane Technology course. I want to try to embed some of the stuff I learned in my product thinking so I might write a blog post about it as a way to start to collect together some thinking about humane tech.

I wrote weeknotes on schedule every week.

Leading an intentional life

My nomadic life along the coastline continued. The weather and dark evenings haven’t stopped me from visiting beautiful places each day.

Innovation is a challenge in the charity sector. Not only are charities stuck between constraints on funding innovation and the need to create new value and better ways of operating, but all of the innovation methodologies are aimed at commercial organisations. So, how do charities innovate? How do they take a good idea and create social good?

I interviewed four charities with innovation teams in order to try to find out. We discussed their innovation processes, their motivations for innovating and how they judge the success of innovations.

From an analysis of research I built a theory for innovation in charities and develop the ‘charity innovation model’ which plots the approach a charity takes towards innovation on a two-by-two matrix by assessing common characteristics in motivation to innovate, implementation of innovation process and the judging of innovation success to indicate whether the innovations produced are likely to be incremental or radical innovation and strategic or social innovation.

The research concludes that charities do not use their innovation teams to develop radical new solutions to tackle social issues which contributes to answering the question often raised about charity innovation; ‘if charities are innovating, why are there still so many social issues?’

The full research write-up is here.