356: Creativity Unleashed: Strategies for Sparking Innovation in Your Nonprofit

Would you like to increase the level of innovation in your organization? Listen to Leah Kral to learn how you can unleash the creativity of your staff to be more effective in fulfilling your mission and vision. Leah is senior director of strategy and innovation at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. 

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In this episode:

• What inspired Leah to work with nonprofits? (04:12)
• Leah's history as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica and seeing extreme poverty (04:26)
• For the last 20 years, Leah has been helping nonprofit teams be more effective and innovative (06:50)
• What does innovation mean for nonprofits? (07:58)
• "I think innovation is simply about finding new and better ways of doing things, you know, to add value in some way, to add value for someone, or to, perhaps, save time or gain some efficiency." (08:05)
• We should really always be searching for better ways of doing things. (10:28)
• How we can use good questions to help us get past the surface to more meaningful ideas and solutions (11:26)
• The innovation of Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York. (12:57)
• The design thinking framework consists of three kinds of major questions:
  • What's desirable?
  • What’s scalable?
  • What's feasible? (14:09)
• Experimentation boosts creativity—“Fail fast and fail small.”  (15:33)
• If you're aiming for big, scalable social change, first, take an inventory of your assets. (20:58)
• Scaling involves identifying a unique approach or strategy that will create momentum in some way. (22:53)
• The key practices in workplace culture when it comes to innovation (25:32)
• The importance of having values that are built into your systems and processes in different ways. (27:35)
• Discussing frontline workers and their role in innovation. (33:11)
• How can a leader encourage innovation and idea sharing for people at all levels of the organization? (33:33)

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