Sometimes innovation means doing less. Look at which partnerships, communications and fundraising approaches will yield the deepest outcomes and phase out other items on your wish list over future years, when staffing can increase.

Innovation is vital to addressing complex societal challenges at scale. Here are some tips to foster a culture of innovation: - Foster a fail-safe environment: Encourage lean experiments, celebrate failures as learnings, and ensure they don’t negatively impact the organization or community - Upskill cost-effectively: Use guest speakers, online courses on topics like human-centered design, and case studies of innovative solutions across sectors - Gather diverse feedback: Collect input from communities, partners, leaders, and staff to unlock fresh ideas and new ways of thinking - Develop and pitch innovative pilots: Create concept notes for new initiatives and present them to funders willing to provide risk capital for bold solutions

Instead of focusing on what’s lacking, look at the resources you do have and maximize them creatively. Leverage cross-sector partnerships, tap into community knowledge, and embrace technology that can stretch your impact. Encourage your team to challenge assumptions and simplify processes, removing inefficiencies. Small, incremental innovations—like repurposing existing tools or crowdsourcing solutions—can lead to breakthrough changes. Constraints often drive the most powerful innovations, so think expansively about how to use what’s already within reach.

In an organization with limited resources, prioritizing innovation requires a clear understanding of the purpose and strategic goals. Focus on innovations that directly align with core objectives, deliver the highest impact, and address key challenges. Define what matters most - whether it’s improving efficiency, enhancing customer experiences, or driving growth - we can find a balance that can streamline efforts toward ideas that offer the greatest value that are sustainable, long-term, while staying agile to adapt to changing needs. Also include a few feedback points in your innovation process. Over time your innovation process will improve by itself: targeted innovation, meaningful progress within available constraints.

The key 🔑 lies in developing and launching pilots, by carefully choosing the location and community. Strongly believe that if innovations taste early success, scaling up is much easier.

Every agency needs a ecosystem, but this is doubly true as soon as you see the phrase 'limited resources.' There is not enough leadership time available to think through and test new ideas by yourself. You could be a specialist in a program that you run and build a vertical ecosystem with a larger organization to help them as they offer resources to help you innovate. You could build a horizontal ecosystem where the clients are the same and you're working together with other agencies of similar size to build new services. Each system is unique. But if I were directing again, I would spend two days per week building the ecosystem and trust my competent managers to direct current programs.