OpenIDEO - OpenIDEO Team Notes - Pathways to Impact

Field Notes

Inspiring content from across OpenIDEO & IDEO's other work.

Jul 26th 2011
Pathways to Impact

Social impact is the big focus of our collaborative community at OpenIDEO, right? The journey to real-world impact can take many avenues and each OpenIDEO challenge presents us with its own set of opportunities and obstacles. Some pathways achieve impact quickly, with relative ease, while others may take significant time and co-ordination of skills and resources. Let's consider various roads to impact:

Mindset & Behaviour Change

We often hear from members of our community that they have started thinking about an issue differently through reflecting on challenges they've participated in. They may have changed the way they think about where their food comes from and this awareness may lead to changes in what they buy, where they buy it and what they might grow. Some challenges may trigger a heightened awareness about limited resources, like water, which might lead to more considered use at home. This in itself is a type of impact that we should acknowledge and celebrate. Together we inspire each other to broaden our perspectives and consider our own actions through our Inspirations, Concepts and conversations. Being a community of optimists – many of us take on mindset and behaviour change as a matter of course as we are exposed to new issues. While we may lead by example, we might also think about what it takes to ignite minds and nudge or inspire behaviour change by others in our communities via some of the other actions below.

Individual Action

We've featured examples of OpenIDEATORS taking personal actions which have been triggered by engaging with our challenges. This usually involves some kind of more committed action around a particular issue which they have become more passionate about. Some have registered to donate bone marrow, joined their local Farmers' Market committee or even created tools to help newcomers on OpenIDEO! These actions build upon mindset and behaviour change and consider how individual actions might help others.

Community Action

Extending from changes in outlook, behaviour and personal pursuits are actions which reach out and enable our own communities – and of course, this is where things get really social! These actions may make use of local networks, events and ways of connecting to take ideas from our online conversations into the real world. They often trigger a series of onwards actions by others, spreading impact along the way.

Some OpenIDEATORS have dipped into their own communities to generate social impact. Chole Tseung was driven to take her winning idea from the Bone Marrow Challenge to encourage her local church to get involved in the cause and run a bone marrow registry drive. Interestingly, Chloe shared the important lesson from her experience that achieving impact can take time: “There is progress but I guess it's a little bit slower than I wanted!” It's great to be able to share the successes, challenges and learnings from OpenIDEATORS making impact to inspire others to take meaningful action in their own communities.

Elsewhere we had an exciting update from a group of OpenIDEATORS in Colombia taking forward a Concept from the Maternal Health and Mobile Technology Challenge. They created a prototype of an outreach ultrasound program which they actually tested in a low-income community and even shared an inspiring video to let us all know what they did, achieved and learned. Some of us might consider prototyping just one aspect of a Concept if an entire idea seems like too much to take on – the important part is trying things out with real people and learning through making impact as we go.

Sponsor Action

Of course we also have the efforts of our awesome challenge sponsors who continue to explore ways in which they can push ideas generated by our community forward. Implementation can often take time due to the scale and co-ordination required to maximise impact and we're committed to sharing progress with you all via our Realisation phases across various challenges.

We've seen some great strides towards impact in our Bone Marrow Donation Challenge. The 100k Cheeks student team has been hard at work incorporating the brilliant ideas generated by the OpenIDEO community into their committed objective to increase bone marrow donors. They've been working on the websites Social Change in a Box to leverage network effects towards impact and Marrow Tree to visualise how messages spread, donors register and lives are saved. These efforts have been inspired by various Concepts from the challenge and 100k Cheeks add that "OpenIDEO continues to influence our thinking and our implementation of these amazing projects."

Meanwhile, building upon the enthusiastic participation from our community on the spirited Local Food Challenge, developments continue around improving connections between food production and consumption. It's been exciting to follow the collective endeavours to imagine of the future of food.

Onwards... We'll continue to update you on progress from sponsor-driven impact. We'd also love it if you'd share your own impact stories with us – big and small – they're all worth celebrating and may inspire others into action.

Image from panox on Flickr.

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Doug Collins

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March 09, 2012, 03:35PM

Yes: individual action leads to authentic transformation.

To this end, I find that the critical leadership question remains...

What does it mean to help the individual realize their potential for
leadership through their practice of collaborative innovation...

http://www.innovationmanagement.se/2011/02/08/how-to-create-a-culture-of-leadership

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Field Notes

Inspiring content from across OpenIDEO & IDEO's other work.

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Jul 26th 2011
Pathways to Impact

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Doug Collins

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Where people design better, together

Field Notes

Inspiring content from across OpenIDEO & IDEO's other work.

Recent blog entries

Jul 26th 2011 Pathways to Impact

Comments

Doug Collins

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Jul 26th 2011
Pathways to Impact