SIX Talks with Gigi Georges: Insights from Harvard's Innovation Strategies Initiative

Gigi Georges is the program director for the Innovation Strategies Initiative at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She was previously a Managing Director of The Glover Park Group, a leading strategic communications consulting firm.  She has also worked for the New York City Department of Education as the Communications Director under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in the White house as a Special Assistant to President Clinton, and as Senator Hillary Clinton’s State Director.  

Georges has worked extensively in social innovation from 2008-2009 as a Kennedy School Ash Center Fellow, to identify best practices alongside Professor Stephen Goldsmith and Ash Center Research Coordinator Tim Glynn Burke. Findings from this work have become a book: The Power of Social Innovation. She is also involved in the Project on Social Innovation, which works hands-on with cities to help build innovation agendas, continues to study the field of social innovation, and runs a “virtual knowledge hub for social innovation in cities and municipalities.” The online hub's purpose is to provide a practical platform for sharing the stories and lessons of exciting innovators from the non-profit, philanthropic and public sectors. The site accomplishes this purpose through an innovator’s toolkit, relevant news updates, profiles of best practices, regular blogging, and links to other online resources. The Project is an initiative of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

In “The Power of Social Innovation,” you explore how civic entrepreneurs can ‘ignite community networks for good.’ What have you learned from this exploration?

We interviewed about 100 civic entrepreneurs from the government, non-profits, businesses and philanthropies to understand their experiences—both their successes and their challenges. We then took what we learned to identify a series of difficult but surmountable tensions and what we hope will prove to be useful levers for overcoming them. 

Across the board, these innovators emphasized the importance of opening space for new ideas, trusting citizens to know what is best for them, the value of increasing expectations for individual potential and responsibility, and the importance of not just growing an innovative organization but working with others inside the social production system to effect change.

In the best examples, we saw three key characteristics:

1. Willingness to challenge existing structures.
2. The potential for bold and transformative change of an existing social service delivery system.  Sometimes this means developing an entirely new approach– through dramatic organizational restructuring, the infusion of new talent or the addition of new technology.  Sometimes it means taking an existing model that is limited in scope and helping it grow to serve significantly greater numbers of people.
3. Solutions that draw from all sectors. Approaches to complex challenges should take the best from the public sector, foundations, non-profits, business, and community leadership.

What have you discovered about the usefulness of networks through this work? What have you learned about empowering people?

We discovered that creating networks across sectors opens space for new ideas to be introduced and take hold. Also, when leaders from different sectors are willing to move out of their silos (and comfort zones), listen to each other’s experience and perspectives, and work together to craft and implement solutions, the results can be phenomenal. 

We saw this, for example, in the Los Angeles Urban League’s efforts to transform a blighted community by dramatically reducing crime and improving the local schools. They did this by creating a strong network across local government (particularly the local police department and public high school), community leaders, businesses, and the local university. They also worked to build the trust and involvement of ordinary citizens – and helped them take ownership over their own community’s future. 

This second point goes to your question about empowering people. We discovered that the most successful civic entrepreneurs work closely with communities in developing new approaches. They listen to what citizens/clients want and get constant feedback so that the model can be refined effectively and quickly.  They focus relentlessly on performance. And they set high expectations both for themselves and the citizens they serve.  These innovators believe that within our communities lie the entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, compassion, and resources to make progress in such critical areas as education, housing, and economic self-reliance. 

What motivated the Ash Center to set up the Project On Social Innovation? What are its main aims?

In part, we wanted to share the great stories we had gathered from so many innovative practitioners. As such we envisioned the platform as a centralized resource on technical, programmatic and policy innovations—both from the book and from our ongoing work. But also, and perhaps more importantly, we wanted the Project to serve as resource on the strategies and tactics needed to develop and grow those new ideas that work for anyone who wants to bring better approaches to our most pressing challenges. 

Finally, we hope that the practicing innovators who come to the site will emerge as its most valuable resource – that ultimately, it will be built by them and used as a laboratory for creating, finding and sharing solutions among the growing community of people who identify themselves as innovators.

The Project On Social Innovation aggregates online resources, profiles best practice, and provides innovators with regularly updated news, blogs and a toolkit. What inspired this particular combination of building blocks?

We hope that through this combination we can provide existing and aspiring innovators with both inspiring examples that spark their imagination and help fill the need (that we heard from so many people we interviewed) for practical tools to pursue specific goals successfully. We also hope to become a source for news about the latest promising innovation efforts, so that this same audience could keep up-to-date on what’s developing -- and we encourage innovators from all sectors to contribute their own stories and lessons to the website through guest posts and/or comments on our blog. 

We view what we’ve created thus far through the Project as just a first step in the type of resources we can provide. We hope that by continuing to develop and improve the online hub, in conjunction with the broader innovation work of the Ash Center (including its Innovations in Government Awards Program, Government Innovators Network portal and Innovation Webinar Series), we can begin to build communities of innovative practitioners who exchange ideas, experiences and lessons with each other on a regular basis.

Your Toolkit for Social Innovators aims to ‘provide system-level change strategies, tips and tools culled from the experience of innovators driving change in communities across the country.’ How was the toolkit created, and how do you anticipate it will be used?

We took the lessons we learned from the many civic entrepreneurs we interviewed for The Power of Social Innovation and boiled them down to a set of key strategies.  We’ve also had the opportunity to test a number of these strategies as we developed the toolkit, as this past year we have been working with mayor’s offices in a handful of U.S. cities to develop and test innovative approaches to policy problem solving. 

We hope that this toolkit will be used by any individual, organization or public sector leader that wants to challenge approaches to problem solving that simply aren’t working and not only offer new ideas but successfully implement innovative solutions with and for the communities they hope to serve. It offers practical advice and examples that we believe can help serve as a road map. At the same time, we strongly believe that strategies and examples must be adapted to local circumstances and environments. Simply applying a cookie-cutter approach is not the answer, and will most likely lead to frustration and failure.

Broadly speaking, what are the biggest barriers to social innovation in the US?

In early 20th century, the Progressive era in the U.S. transformed government to end the culture of patronage, nepotism and corruption that preceded it. The Progressives' move to formalize procedures and professionalize government through rule-based bureaucracy was a critical innovation in it time. Today many of the rules that were so valuable 100 years ago to protect citizens have steered government to a place that is unpopular and unsustainable. Communities have inherited systems that struggle to get the balance right between what government must do to guarantee health, safety, and performance and what government too often does—over-prescribing activities and limiting individual initiative.

As a result, there is a government or nonprofit program for every imaginable problem. Yet too often these programs fail to meet the needs of the people they seek to serve. Our social systems allow too little space for improvement because they suffer from a lack of meaningful focus on measurable results, rule-bound funding and a deep-seeded aversion to risk.

They’ve also been infected with a “curse of professionalism” which causes providers (despite the best of intentions) to assume they know what is best for citizens who receive services without asking what works for them. In many of today’s bureaucracies, technically proficient professionals design solutions for other people. We’ve shut communities out of determining much of their own progress and lowered expectations too far for individual potential and responsibility. We’ve encouraged and increased a dependence on government that stifles upward mobility.

Our communities need delivery systems that meet the needs and capabilities of the 21st century realities of dramatically rising demand and rapidly diminishing resources. In order to achieve these new solutions, we first need a major rethinking of the approaches and institutional regimes that have built up over decades around fighting poverty, protecting and educating our children, caring for seniors, sheltering the homeless, and more. Reforms will continue to fail if they are aimed at tinkering with the same old activities.

How do you think that the social innovation agenda will affect us all over the next 3 years? Working together, what can we accomplish? What is our collective goal, and how should we get there?

The increasing economic and social challenges here in the U.S. and across the globe open the door for more and more social innovators to offer new and potentially transformative solutions. But they can’t do it alone. It is important to recognize that in the U.S. and a number of other developed nations, government--by virtue of its vast resources and authority--is the dominant player in funding or providing social services and safety nets. In these countries if social innovators are going to be successful, they must interact with, and ultimately seek to change government.

In countries with less government tradition and less government institutional infrastructure around social problem solving, innovators might focus more on social enterprises or fee for service models. Notably these types of solutions are also thriving in the U.S. and U.K. as revenues continue to decline but commitments like Social Security and Medicare continue to grow.

More visible public and private sector leadership that champions social innovation, as well as the increasing presence of networks and hubs like SIX that are dedicated to the support and expansion of social innovation, are also critical to helping move the social innovation agenda and to building broader and deeper constituencies that support this agenda. 

Working together in the next three years we can do much to shift the climate and culture around social policy and service delivery from compliance and acceptance of failure to a willingness to take risks and test promising new ideas.  We can also begin to build the capacity of government, external organizations and citizens to collaborate in identifying and implementing results-oriented solutions in their local communities – and to hold each other accountable as they chart their course.