Inovation needs big and small players

The Collaborate|2008 event last week gave me a chance to catch up again with John Craig, who is director of the Innovation Exchange, charged with helping nonprofits improve their capacity to deliver public services. We last met a couple of months back over wine and pizzas. I wanted to find out about the Ideas Festivals the Exchange is planning, and also what insights John had picked in his work so far.

He explained among other things that he wanted to dispel two misconceptions: the first that innovators were often heroic individuals working in isolation; the second that organisations were incapable of innovation without substantial resources. In fact innovation in the third sector was likely to be successful through partnerships between smaller innovators and larger organisations who could scale up their ideas.

John blogs Collaborate|2008 here.