Our book, Social Innovation and Impact in Nonprofit Leadership, was written with the social sector (e.g. social enterprise, nonprofit, government) managers and leaders in mind who collectively can create an environment that enables continual innovation while demanding real impact and performance. In Stephen Goldsmith’s The Power of Social Innovation: How Civic Entrepreneurs Ignite Community Networks for Good, he notes that to truly create vibrant cities, we need to invent new approaches and then grow and execute (some say “scale”) these social innovations across systems (John Wiley and Sons, 2010).
The real question becomes how to shift traditional social sector nonprofit staff into social entrepreneurs who work in partnership with formula-based governmental agencies. For social sector agencies, private sector entrepreneurs, and nonprofit agencies and their emerging or seasoned management to thrive, there is a need to teach and expose them to the similar tools and resources that entrepreneurs pursuing private sector ventures need.
Young or seasoned staff in the nonprofit or government sectors do not usually have the opportunity to learn or understand the process of innovation. However, the Social Innovation and Impact in Nonprofit Leadership is a great resource to learn. In the book readers will learn best practices and strategies to pursue new ideas, products and services, and market test them, to create/adjust social impact measures and financially sustainable business models, to determine scalability probability, to conduct competitor analysis and finally, to create an execution plan that blends public policy and business practices.