Innovate or die. (organizations)(includes related article)

Six lessons about fostering inventiveness from five United Way state associations.

Each spring, trees and bushes sprout new buds in new places. They are signs of new life. You can distinguish them by their lighter, brighter green color. If new buds don't sprout, you have a problem. The tree or bush is in trouble and could die without emergency attention.

Organizations and associations are no different. Unless there is a continual cycle of new ideas, new sprouts among the old, their survival may be in jeopardy. One of the greatest challenges now facing organizations, including associations, is to develop an ongoing capacity to generate new ideas and to put them into effective practice. In a word, to innovate.

A great idea is not enough. People must champion it through all the difficulties of its adoption, testing, improvements, production, and enactment. Signaled by such seminal thinkers as Rosabeth Moss Kanter (The Change Masters, 1983) and Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1984), organizational researchers for the past decade have pointed to a clear and compelling conclusion: To continue to thrive and grow, organizations must work hard at finding tomorrow's successes today, before yesterday's successes wane and atrophy sets in.

Organizations that stubbornly or nonchalantly tie their future to yesterday's or even today's successes will not compete successfully in tomorrow's changing marketplace of products, services, or ideas. They will be like trees that fail to have new buds.

Associations as innovations

Associations themselves are one of the modern era's most pervasive social innovations. Free association produced new forms of social life: political parties, labor unions, the Grange movement, professional societies, business trade groups, social reform alliances, fund-raising campaigns, private and community foundations, social research institutes, and many more. Immigrant-founded mutual-aid associations initiated cooperative services to provide their members with jobs, old-age pensions, and relief from life's hardships.

From their beginnings, most of these new associations helped promote other innovations, technological as well as social. Associations institutionalized innovations by setting new standards of product safety, professional ethics and service, and organizational certification to protect consumer interests. Perhaps not so obvious were the social innovations produced by the lobbying efforts of associations in almost every field and the promotion of research that helped identify problems that needed new solutions, or new markets needing new services, or new products destined to create new markets.

Today, almost every association's members expect it to find and communicate to them the "best practices" that will help them be more efficient and effective in reaching their goals. Indeed, an association's members expect it to be a "learning organization" for them, smartly gathering relevant intelligence both from its members and from their social, economic, and political environments and conveying the information through useful and accessible media and venues.

United Way Innovations

For more than a century, community leaders organized enterprises to gauge social needs, identify ways of …