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03042008 Tuesday Mar 04, 2008


Get your thinking hats on

As I’ve mentioned before, the voluntary sector is facing more and more competition from the private sector to deliver innovative solutions to complex social issues.

This calls for a spirit of collaboration and openness, between charities, sectors and disciplines (and, of course, some extra cash never hurts…). A couple of examples of ways to encourage and facilitate this collaboration have come to light recently.

The first is the Innovation Exchange, which aims to “improve the relationships between third sector practitioners, public service commissioners, social investors and policy makers.” The Exchange has already attracted a pretty heavyweight list of contributors and should spark off some interesting debate.

The second is the Social Innovation Camp, which takes place between 4th and 6th April. Their website poses the slightly scary question:

“What happens when you get a bunch of software developers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them?” 

Answers on a postcard please.

It’ll be interesting to see what projects and collaborations fall out of these initiatives – it’s also great to see more of a unified approach to tackling social issues.

Posted by Sam Thomas ( 10:33 AM ) Link to this post Comments[4]


Comments:

What I find most interesting about the Innovation Exchange and the Social Innovation Camp is that, in theory, they provide exactly the framework on which the voluntary sector can 'compete' against the private sector - and that is, by voluntary sector agencies choosing to collaborate rather than compete against each other.

The forms of collaboration and sharing open to the Third Sector simply are not available to for-profit companies - and that provides us with some exciting opportunities...

Will certainly be interesting to see what comes out of both innovation projects....

Posted by Tim Davies on March 04, 2008 at 07:25 PM GMT+00:00 #

Good point Tim - as a fundraiser it's easy to get caught up in seeing it as "competition"!

Co-operation, not competition!

Posted by Sam Thomas on March 06, 2008 at 09:15 AM GMT+00:00 #

Thanks loads for the interest in the Innovation Exchange. Check out our 'call or ideas' at www.innovation-exchange.org/festivals-of-ideas

Posted by johncraig on March 09, 2008 at 06:08 PM GMT+00:00 #

Nice post. Most of the time charities face problems in fund raising, HELP provides complete help and support to charities in fund raising.

Posted by Help on March 11, 2008 at 07:25 AM GMT+00:00 #

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