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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.

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Our mission is to scale up collaboration and decision-making. We envision an era in which large communities can deliberate and brainstorm with one another on important issues with the aid of intelligently designed algorithms and digital communication platforms.

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

California Common Sense is a Stanford-based nonprofit using Silicon Valley technologies to open government finances to the public, engage citizens in data-driven discourse, and catalyze a grassroots movement for more effective and efficient governance.

Information technology is revolutionizing the classroom and driving down the costs of producing first-rate educational materials. Many universities are putting their classes online for free, so that anyone in the world can learn physics, math, or economics from world-class faculty. At Stanford University this fall, two computer-science professors put their courses online for students anywhere in the world; now they have an enrollment of 58,000.

The same breakthroughs now possible in education can occur in health care. The US health-care system is notoriously expensive, partly because many of the key costs are controlled by the American Medical Association and private-sector health-insurance companies, which act like monopolists, driving up costs. Such monopoly pricing should be ended.

The Center for Deliberative Democracy, housed in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, is devoted to research about democracy and public opinion obtained through Deliberative Polling®.

The Digital Civil Society Lab at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society created digitalIMPACT.io to support civil society organizations in using digital data ethically, safely, and effectively. The content and tools on the site come from nonprofit and foundation partners. digitalIMPACT.io is designed to help you learn from and share with others. The materials are provided as examples to inform your decision-making, organizational practice, and policy creation. We invite you to use and adapt what you find here, and hope you will share the practices and policies that you've developed. This website is only a start; real change will come as organizations integrate appropriate data management and governance throughout their work.

The Bootcamp Bootleg is an overview of some of our most-used tools. The guide was originally intended for recent graduates of our Bootcamp: Adventures in Design Thinking class. But we've heard from folks who've never been to the d.school that have used it to create their own introductory experience to design thinking.

The following are excerpts from the PBS documentary on the What's Next California Deliberative Poll® on governance reform.

Modeling to Learn Team Needs