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The Project on Social Innovation provides this virtual knowledge hub for social innovation in cities and municipalities. Its purpose is to provide a practical platform for sharing the stories and lessons of exciting innovators from the nonprofit, philanthropic and public sectors. The Project on Social Innovation accomplishes this purpose through an innovator's toolkit, relevant news updates, profiles of best practices, regular blogging, and links to other online resources. The site is an initiative of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

The Social Innovation Labs started in 2012 in partnership with the Bush Foundation. In the past two years, more than 1,200 community change makers have participated in 11 lab events. Each lab has had a different theme, but all of them focused on the following overall goal and strategies: Our vision: All Minnesotans thrive in a socially just, ecologically sound, and economically sustainable ecosystem of social innovation. More about our vision: The fruits of the ecosystem and the cultural soil that makes it possible: visioniconStrategies to move toward this vision: 1. Learn new tools and ways of seeing things 2. Advance innovative projects 3. Connect with other change makers Simple rules for the Lab: 1. Bring an open heart, mind, and will  2. Listen to the part, whole, and greater whole 3. Attend to difference, privilege and disparity 4. Tango with different perspectives to seek unexpected sparks 5. Invite a balance of creativity and structure 6. Honor commitments

At IDEO.org, we believe that the most potent weapon against global poverty is design. The solutions, systems, and social innovation that arise from truly understanding and designing alongside the poor are the most likely to offer hope and improve lives. And for us, if we can't see real impact, we haven't done our jobs.   Born in 2011 out of the global design and innovation firm IDEO, IDEO.org is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to applying human-centered design to alleviate poverty. We partner with nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, and foundations, to directly address the needs of the poor in sectors like health, water and sanitation, financial inclusion, agriculture, and gender equity. We employ top-notch designers, an elite class of businesspeople, and development experts, making IDEO.org a flexible and creative organization uniquely situated to tackle poverty through design.   A key pillar of our mission is to spread human-centered design. Though we believe that our design process is crucial to arriving at innovative solutions, we don't think that we're the only ones who should be using it. We want everyone on board. By sharing, teaching, and empowering social-sector workers to practice human-centered design, we're elevating design as a poverty-fighting tool.   We work at home and abroad, on our own projects and promoting and supporting the work of others, spreading the practice and promise of human-centered design. IDEO.org is dedicated innovation, great design, and changing lives

Whether we are struggling to generate fresh ideas or staring at problems with no solutions in sight, the spark of creative genius often seems out of reach. In this audio lecture from Stanford Social Innovation Review's Nonprofit Management Institute, Stanford Professor Tina Seelig discusses how we can unlock our creative genius through a set of tools and conditions we each have in our control-our "innovation engine." Based on real-world examples and a dozen years of experience teaching courses on creativity and entrepreneurship in the Stanford School of Engineering, Seelig challenges traditional assumptions about creativity to show us how we can seek out the right resources and environment to fuel our innovation engines. She contends that just as the scientific method demystifies the process of discovery, there is a formal process for unlocking the pathway to innovation.

WHO WE ARE Design Impact is a non-profit social innovation firm made up of designers, community development practitioners, social entrepreneurs, and educators. We collaborate with passionate people, bring design and innovation practice to the table, and work together to design a better world. Our mission is to: * INCUBATE projects that transform communities, * EQUIP leaders with social innovation tools, and * ADVANCE methods of creative community change.

"CrowdDoing is a joint initiative of Reframe It Inc. and Match4Action Foundation that is focused on helping address the UN Sustainable Development Goals and beyond through micro-leadership, massively multi-disciplinary collaboration, and service learning to support social innovation and social enterprise to achieve systemic change. "

The Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation is focused on developing policies and programs to accelerate economic recovery and create stronger communities. We do this by harnessing human capital and facilitating financial capital.

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS Designing Change: This course extends the purview of design to the structure of society, government, education, healthcare and business. Students will be provided a thorough grounding in systems thinking and how to identify leverage points to create change. They will produce designs and models for a new product, as well as its launch and distribution in a developing country. Training will also be offered in Positive Deviance, a change model used with great success in childcare, women's issues, healthcare and corporate innovation.

At the Center for Wise Democracy we have developed a set of social innovations that offer breakthrough progress on these impossible-seeming issues. These innovations are being proven to work by citizen groups and government leaders. For example in Central Europe, government leaders are using the Wisdom Council to involve and empower citizens, build the spirit of community, break through partisan gridlock, and to leap forward difficult, impossible-seeming issues. Other examples are:

Learn more about the system dynamics lab at Washington University in St. Louis. We are experts in developing simulation models of problems facing complex social systems. A resource for students, professionals, and researchers, we help build the capacity of those who want to learn and apply system dynamics in order to understand and address specific problems within an organization and community. Our Research Our research includes a focus on understanding the role of social determinants at the community level, identifying strategies for reducing disparities, and informing implementation, scale-up and sustainability of evidence based interventions. Application areas include community responses to intimate partner violence, mental health, natural resources, obesity, cancer, child and maternal health, financial inclusion, K-12 education, and juvenile/criminal justice. Community Engagement We are actively involved in advancing participatory group model building (GMB) methods in diverse communities including both international and domestic settings. Teaching We are invested in building capacity in system dynamics among the next generation of researchers, policy makers, and social innovators. The lab offers a sequence of graduate level courses that prepare students to tackle dynamic social problems with innovative, design-driven, transdisciplinary solutions.

SFI's Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability research effort is creating an interdisciplinary approach and quantitative synthesis of organizational and dynamical aspects of human social organizations, with an emphasis on cities. Different disciplinary perspectives are being integrated in terms of the search for similar dependences of urban indicators on population size - scaling analysis - and other variables that characterize the system as a whole. A particularly important focus of this research area is to develop theoretical insights about cities that can inform quantitative analyses of their long-term sustainability in terms of the interplay between innovation, resource appropriation, and consumption and the make up of their social and economic activity. This focus area brings together urban planners, economists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and complex system theorists with the aim of generating an integrated and quantitative understanding of cities. Outstanding areas of research include the identification of general scaling patterns in urban infrastructure and dynamics around the world, the quantification of resource distribution networks in cities and their interplay with the city's socioeconomic fabric, issues of temporal acceleration and spatial density, and the long-term dynamics of urban systems.

EmcArts Inc. is a social enterprise for learning and innovation in the arts. We serve as a nonprofit intermediary for many arts funders, and as a service organization for the arts field around innovation. We exist to strengthen the capacities and effectiveness of nonprofit arts and cultural organizations, serving their needs in the design and management of innovative change, and assisting them in building their adaptive capacity.

We provide resources to artists who demonstrate artistic excellence and serve as innovative conduits for social change. We evaluate the quality of work in this evolving field by fostering an inclusive, practical discourse about the aesthetics, function, ethics and meaning of socially engaged art that resonates within and outside the contemporary art dialogue.

The Presencing Institute is an awareness-based action-research community for profound individual and institutional renewal. Over the past two decades, we have developed Theory U as a social technology, led cross-sector change initiatives worldwide, and created a popular innovation platform (originally launched as a Massive Open Online Course) called u.lab.

Breakthrough Capitalism Our financial, environmental and social systems are heading towards breakdown. But some visionary organisations in the corporate and investment communities are stepping beyond traditional corporate social responsibility (CSR) and socially responsible investment (SRI) and driving systemic change with breakthrough ventures. This is the focus of Phase II of the Breakthrough Capitalism program: see Progress Report. To contribute to the upcoming report Betting on Breakthrough: Top Team Agendas for Transformative Change, or to get involved with a Breakthrough Labs, please contact breakthrough@volans.com

Since the 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article introduced the concept, collective impact has been widely adopted as an effective form of cross-sector collaboration to address complex social and environmental challenges. Though collective impact has proven to be a powerful approach in tackling a wide range of issues in communities all over the world, many practitioners are searching for the tools they need to be successful in this work. The thought leadership and resources below, and in the Resources and Blog sections of this website, will help you build a foundation for doing this work

"We need to ratchet up from targeted innovation and apply design-thinking principles to one of the biggest social issues of our time: global poverty itself. "

Soulful Cities is a coalition of innovators, urban designers and social equity pioneers fostering cultural development in newly urbanized areas.

Californians know how to innovate, how to be entrepreneurial, and how to use technology to create well-paying jobs. The state's diverse regional economies reflect the nation and world. And our values - including our commitment to sustainability and social inclusion - inspire us to lead and position us to chart a course for parts of the nation paralyzed by economic stagnation and the ensuing political backbiting.

Community Four is a Not for Profit, DGR1 registered community organization. Established in 2016, we are a team of social innovation professionals from the humanitarian, education and corporate sectors. We use our unique approach of Symbiotic Innovation to support diverse community led groups to unite and create solutions to complex social challenges.