The new skills for social change
For centuries we’ve lived in a capitalist world shaped largely by commercial and economic interests, and that’s not changing any time soon, but commercial markets can be a powerful force for good.
Tag Archives: Innovation
The power of ambition
The problem with setting targets is that you achieve them, when perhaps you could have achieved far more.
Innovation is child’s play
Innovation, or so we believe, is the silver bullet that will simultaneously broaden our reach, increase our impact, raise us out of the crowd and future-proof our organisation. The irony is, a silver bullet is the last thing we should be looking for.
What the future holds
There’s no point developing new services or products that are relevant to customers now, only to find that by the time they’re ready to launch, the audience has moved on. You need to skate to where the puck is going to be, in two or three years’ time, not to where it is now.
The charity entrepreneur
Ideas that look great on paper may not look quite so great to your potential customers. So how do you decide when to invest behind new ideas?
A question of innovation
In any organisation there will be lots of people who have ideas as to how things could be improved, but how do you decide which ones to back?
Transforming ideas
One of the biggest challenges for charities over the next few years will be how to bridge the gap between the money you can raise, and the money you need to spend, and there are just three ways to do that…
Stop looking for markets to enter
One of the interesting aspects of what I’ll call “the charity mindset”, is that we do things on a shoestring and if we can cover our costs, we’re good to go. That mindset leads to some very dangerous assumptions indeed.
Stop waiting for the data
The best way to develop high value commercial income with genuine impact, is to find unmet need and to create new markets around it, but that means a lot of people inside your charity need to change their expectations.
Video: profit versus impact
In this three minute video, Martyn demonstrates and explains a simple tool that you can use with the executive team in your charity and social enterprise, to quickly prioritise the big initiatives
