COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION FOR SHARED PROSPERITY, EQUITY & SUSTAINABILITY
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OUR TOOLS
We develop, test, and refine a lot of powerful tools to help people solve complex problems together—and we share freely. Because by helping you succeed in making the world a better place, we also succeed, even if we never actually work with you.
Please note that some of the resources are easy to use "right out of the box" while others may require some training or support. If you have any questions about using a tool, please let us know.
The Collaborative Innovation Methodology
These resources provide the basic process model and introductions to organizing the work of complex change.
Collaborative Innovation Roadmap
A layered guide to the collaborative innovation process, showing the stages, work products, success factors, and patterns in a typical collaborative innovation initiative. Useful for collective impact collaborations, supply chain transformations, large enterprise change initiatives, and other types of multistakeholder collaborations.
Not Collaboration as Usual
Our brief description of some key distinctions in the Collaborative Innovation Approach
How Innovation Networks Work
A simple infographic outlining key elements of the Collaborative Innovation approach for solving tough problems.
7 Ways the Work Gets Done
One of the beautiful – and powerful – things about innovation networks is that the work of the group gets advanced in many ways and at many levels. Here are seven of the most common ways work is advanced.
6 Patterns in Collaborative Innovation
While collaboration can be emergent and messy, certain patterns do show up in the work. Seeing and effectively leveraging these patterns makes collaboration more efficient, effective, and productive. Here are 6 key patterns you can harness and shape to help any collaboration work better.
Stage 1. Aligning Shared Intent
Powerful change starts with a powerful intent that attracts people, energy, and resources to the work. After all, as the great Yogi Berra put it, "If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else."
Designing a Powerful Shared Intent
A clear and powerful shared intent is key to the success of any collaboration. Use this guide to learn how to keep diverse stakeholders at the table despite their differences, generates energy and momentum to fuel the work, and establishes the focus for everyone to stay on track amidst competing priorities and political forces.
Creative Tensions in Collaborative Innovation
This is a capture of the most common creative tensions that we leverage in developing effective innovation networks. These tensions can either tear groups apart or become sources of profound innovation.
Awareness-based Leadership
Ever heard of "use of self"? It's the idea that we can use ourselves as powerful instruments of change in service of a greater good. But what is use of self and how do we cultivate powerful use of self? This resource describes four key elements.
Stage 2. Connecting the Change System
Taking the time to cultivate an optimal mix of diverse stakeholders to lead the change is key to changing any system. And by being intentionally selective, you're actually being more inclusive of the full diversity of the system.
Collaborative Innovator Attributes
To advance the work quickly and powerfully, we seek out high-leverage stakeholders who are well-positioned to drive innovation and influence others in the system. These Collaborative Innovators have certain characteristics, each of which represents a key tension between two seemingly opposing values.
Adoption of Innovation Model
Based on the pioneering research of Everett Rogers on how innovations spread throughout social networks, this model is helpful for identifying which stakeholders to engage in spreading social innovations too. Our version of the model identifies the unique roles of various groups in developing, translating, and scaling social innovations.
The Four Voices of Collaborative Innovation
We want to make sure that all the right voices are in the room in our collaborative innovation initiatives. The Four Voices of Collaborative Innovation, based the Four Voices framework conceived by our friends Jim Scully and John Body at ThinkPlace, helps us ensure that we have the voices of Intent, Experience, Expertise, and Design, and provides examples for how to bring those voices into your work.
The Five Levels of Engagement
As a baseline assessment for any collaboration or network, we like to clarify the level of engagement they believe they need to succeed. Using the 5 Levels of Engagement Model, we ask:
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What level are you leading at now?
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What level do you need to lead to achieve your greatest goal?
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What will it take to get to that level of engagement?
Virtual Meetings for Clarity and Momentum
Moving your meetings and convenings online? We often assume that online meetings mean disengagement and boredom but some of our most meaningful, intimate, and energetic sessions have happened online.
This accessible guide provides practical tips and resources for supporting engaging and meaningful meetings online.
12 Tools to Foster Alignment & Collaboration
Here's a small kit of simple tools that we often use to help minimize resistance and polarization in groups so they can get and stay aligned in the work and collaborate effectively.
Try these out, and let us know how they worked for you!
4 Agendas in Collaborative Innovation
The basis of our approach, the Four Agendas framework is based on our observations from dozens of multi-stakeholder collaborations and helps leaders design the optimal mix of Connecting, Aligning, Learning, and Making needed to advance effective collaboration and co-design.
Disponible en Español: Las Cuatro Agendas en la Inovación Colaborativa
Innovation Network Roles
A brief overview of the key roles that various participants might fill in a collaborative innovation network.
Innovation Network Structure
A handy overview of the key elements of the structure of a collaborative innovation network.
Building Trust by Giving & Receiving Feedback
Here's a reliable and effective approach to handling feedback with stakeholders in a way that builds understanding and trust while improving behaviors that are interfering with effective collaboration.
Building a Culture of Accountability
Accountability can seem like an elusive thing when working across organizational, sectoral, and cultural boundaries. It can be difficult to ensure that people will do what they say they will do when they say they will do it. Luckily, accountability is a mindset and commitment that can be built. This document outlines some ways to do that.
The Values Iceberg
This model describes 4 levels of meaning-making that people can engage in, from asserting their positions (the most superficial and hardest to collaborate around) to exploring and understanding their interests and values to understanding their seemingly opposing values as polarities. The deeper we're able to work in the iceberg, the more creative and generative we can be in our work together.
Stage 3. Learning about the Larger System
5 Systems Mapping Methods
Shared information, insight, and analysis is key to effective collaboration, but understanding complex systems can be difficult, especially for diverse groups with different ways of thinking and knowing. Here are several useful methods, rated by level of difficulty, that help diverse groups simultaneously see a system, understand the dynamics within that system, and identify possible intervention points.
7 System Conditions Guiding our Work
The foundation of our work at CoCreative is our belief in the need for Shared Prosperity and Ecological Sustainability. This page summarizes the 7 “system conditions” that we believe must be met in order to achieve sustainable prosperity for all.
Stage 4. Designing Interventions
Collective design of interventions leads to collective ownership of the work. The challenge is to leverage the diverse ideas, perspectives, and interests of your group to identify and develop robust strategies. Doing this in the room, together, in real time is the best way to build ownership and momentum for the tough work ahead.
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Four (Better) Brainstorming Techniques
Most brainstorming sessions use technology that was developed 60 years ago – the "all ideas are good and we need to generate as many ideas as possible" approach. Here are four methods that will usually generate better ideas than the conventional approach.
5 Methods for Moving Fast
Is your collaboration getting stuck in endless analysis and discussion? Are people getting polarized because people are unable to move beyond their favored positions? Here are 5 ways to get unstuck and move faster in your work together.
10 Ways to Leverage Human Insight in Collaborative Innovation
We often employ methods from human-centered design in our collaborative innovation projects. Here are 10 of those methods that you can start using today.
8 Elements of Good Strategy
What makes good strategy? There are many opinions on this but here's our take. We use this checklist to help organizations assess the strategy that's emerging from our Collaborative Strategy process.
Stage 5. Making Solutions
Getting from analysis and ideas to concrete prototypes and then piloting those solutions in the real world requires commitment, stamina, and just plain grit. But this is also the fun part, where groups truly realize how powerful and effective they are together!
Project Concept Worksheet
A template that we use when network participants have identified potential projects (e.g. possible solutions) and need to develop those ideas into more complete concepts.
12 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs are amazing at leveraging limited resources to launch new products and services, and build new businesses – and serial entrepreneurs are the best of all because they've done this multiple times. Based on our work with both business and social entrepreneurs over the years, we've collected this list of the ways they think and act that have informed our own practice.
Stage 6. Scaling Initiatives
Getting from analysis and ideas to concrete prototypes and then piloting those solutions in the real world requires commitment, stamina, and just plain grit. But this is also the fun part, where groups truly realize how powerful and effective they are together!
Backcasting a Roadmap of Work
Backcasting is a simple but powerful and engaging tool for planning work together with groups. It builds collective ownership and helps everyone see the critical dependencies in the work, so they understand why the work today needs to get done. Here are instructions for a simple backcasting exercise.
Initiative Map
Once you've identified your network's key initiatives and formed teams around them, here's a simple template to track and manage the group's work. Of course, you'll share many more documents and tasks with the group, but this is a simple, useful way to get started in organizing the work.