Innovation Dynamics

A colleague and I were asked to develop the nation’s first doctorate program in social innovation — at the University of Southern California, where Andrew Benedict-Nelson and I were both innovators in residence. Cool. Great assignment. But almost immediately, we ran into a problem: we couldn’t find a good definition of social innovation, or at least one good enough for the serious people who would enroll in this program.

So we developed our own. It was grounded in years of our own work and in what we were learning from the social scientists we were hanging out with at USC. From there, we developed an approach to doing social innovation — which is being taught in a couple of universities and is the subject of a book we wrote to get students started.

Below is a fun series of short videos to introduce you to our approach, so you can do it too.