Friday, November 26, 2010

Next Steps for Association Innovation



This is an exciting time for the WSAE Innovation Task Force. At our last meeting on November 19 we talked about several new initiatives whose success will clearly depend on getting people in the broader community engaged, so I thought I'd share an update here on Hourglass and see if there's anyone out there who'd like to get involved with our objective of defining an evidence-based model of innovation for associations. I've pointed out in the summary below the places where we're especially looking for help, but please feel free to contact me with any ideas and interests you may have.

First of all, our white paper on association innovation is nearly finished. I've posted draft excerpts of the white paper here on Hourglass (here, here and here), but we hope the final version will have much broader dissemination within the association community. We’re looking for appropriate venues to publish and/or present the paper, and encourage your suggestions and help in disseminating it.

Second, we are currently working on a new online community dedicated to innovation for associations. In addition to being a great networking site, we will be using the levels of innovation readiness described in our white paper (and here, here and here on Hourglass) to structure and conduct facilitated conversations in this community, with the hope that they will help us identify and validate practical strategies for innovative practice. We expect that this exciting innovation “hub” will allow us to connect with a much wider audience and aggregate our industry’s state-of-the-art practices into a comprehensive model of innovation that can serve everyone’s needs as we each move forward with brining innovation to our associations. We're looking for several volunteers to help with this initiative, as we will need identified discussion leaders to monitor conversations and to extract the salient nuggets of information for our evolving innovation model. Let me know if you're interested.

And third, we're beginning to plan for a National Summit on Association Innovation, to be held in conjunction with WSAE’s Annual Educational Conference, September 15, 2011, in Madison, WI. Using the innovation model developed by the online community, we plan to structure a day of activities designed to allow individual participants to construct their own roadmaps of innovation for their associations. Speakers on innovation in the for-profit and non-profit sectors are envisioned, with a majority of the time spent in targeted breakout and discussion sessions. A conference planning committee is currently being assembled to help organize this event, and we hope to attract association executives from around the nation to participate. Please let me know if you have an interest in attending or helping to plan this unique conference.

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