Innoweave + NESTA’s DIY toolkit = even more practical tools for Social Innovation
April 28, 2014
Sometimes, the idea of inventing a new way to work towards your organization’s intended impact can seem daunting. Even adapting an existing approach may present challenges. What if you had a simple, easy to access tool to help your team get clarity on a pressing issue, and dive straight into action?
Advancing continuous social innovation in your organization requires investment of time and resources, which are often scarce. Innoweave is proud to have partnered with hundreds of organizations to begin to implement new innovative approaches to enhance their impact. We recognize, however, that large scale changes require large scale investment. Sometimes more discrete work can provide invaluable insight. With the right tools, insights can flow quickly.
Innoweave is a proud supporter of a new the new DIY Toolkit, created by Nesta, an innovation charity based in the UK with a mission to help people and organisations bring great ideas to life. The website contains 30 simple, expertly crafted tools that can help non-profits across a range of issue areas. These easy-to-understand tools offer users a variety of ways to look at issues within their social innovation space, and understand the factors that contribute to them achieving their impact. The DIY toolkit was developed with practitioners in mind, and provides the type of rapid support tools that many practitioners felt was needed (while the toolkit focuses on development organizations, it also provides useful guidance for community sector organizations). Each tool identifies the action desired (“I want to…develop a clear plan/generate new ideas/know the people I’m working with”), and provides a one-page template for working through the majors components of that challenge.
Over the next 18 months, Innoweave will be growing to incorporate specialized adaptations of tools from the DIY toolkit, as well as other tools specifically designed and tested to help nonprofit leaders generate greater impact. Innoweave will be working alongside Nesta to adapt these tools into selected parts of the Innoweave platform, linking specific tools with the Innoweave modules to help disseminate them more effectively to non-profits working through a particular challenge.
For example, a nonprofit looking to…
…might be interested in accessing the Business Model Canvass, or Value Mapping tool to help understand the core focus of their prospective business.
A nonprofit looking to….
Work with other groups to form a Collective Impact initiative…
…might look to the Building Partnerships and Target Group tools for guidance on who to engage, and how.
As Innoweave continues to engage with non-profit leaders to identify tools and approaches to help advance the impact of the community and nonprofit sector, we believe the Nesta DIY Toolkit will help drive the continuous culture of social innovation Innoweave and its partners are working to build.
Click here to explore the DIY Toolkit
The DIY toolkit is supported by Nesta and the Rockefeller Foundation
