Resistance to Change a Powerful Force

Often, I find myself thinking about change and how hard it is to make change happen personally and in the greater community. And, as I was doing some of that type of thinking today I happened on a blog by Jim Moulton from the Knowledge Works Foundation that was discussing the new technology for books and how change does not come easily. That led to another blog post in Fast Company that was written in 2007 called "Change or Die," that has some great thinking and writing on this subject of how to make change happen. Both of those blogs came immediately after reading an article in the STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW that was a Question and Answer interview piece with Judith Rodin, head of the Rockefeller Foundation. That interview did a lot of talking about the grants her Foundation is making to fund innovation (a fancy word for change) in all different kinds of settings.

To keep this posting short enough, I will only elaborate on a couple of ideas discussed in the Rodin interview because they seem like tools that many people could use at various levels to help move the discussion of change and innovation forward.

CROWDSOURCING
It turns out that a major funding focus for the Rockefeller Foundation is innovation. One of the areas in which they have been putting money is called crowdsourcing. They got into this with a for-profit company called InnoCentive. According to the article, Innocentive uses web-based platforms to bring bring together people who have never and will probably never meet to work on solving specific problems. According to the article, this process is used "to gather solutions to problems that have confounded people working in just one place, such as an R&D Department at a pharmaceutical company."

COLLABORATIVE COMPETITIONS
Collaborative Competitions are a subset of the Crowdsourcing idea and the example int he article comes from an organization called Changemakers. One of the major differences is that the web-based platforms Changemakers use have the capacity of showing everyone's thinking so that people are able to build on other people's ideas when they are thinking about big problems -- "looking for ways to help impoverished communities gain access to sanitation and drinking water," as one example. As I read these ideas I wonder how such a crowdsourcing application might be initiated to help our Pee Dee area work on the multi-county problem of dilapidated structures that are blighting so many neighborhoods in our small towns and cities.

User Driven Innovation
This is considered the second major innovation technique discussed in the article and the concept, as structured by a design firm called IDEO, is that those who are most successful with innovations are the ones who allow the people who are going to be implementing or using the product/service/idea to have "a real voice in the development process." I find this intriguing because I know it is an idea that has been discussed by my daughter as she is working on an HIV/Aids research project in Kenya.

There are a lot of ideas out there and there are tools that can be developed for using these tools in the problem solving process. But, as all of these articles touch, there has to be some real recognition of the need for change.