Nonprofit Agencies and Innovation

Last week, I spoke at the National NISH Conference in Atlanta on Innovation processes leading from ideas to reality. NISH is the national nonprofit agency whose mission is to create employment opportunities for people with severe disabilities. NISH helps local and regional nonprofit agencies apply for federal contracts to support this mission by providing employment in a wide range of jobs. These include everything from light manufacturing assembly and call center support services to the more visible Goodwill store operations that I personally frequent for bargains. I found that through the comments, nonprofits share similar experiences with lack of innovation traction among company leadership that you hear from for profit companies which was a little surprising since an organization that relies so heavily on fund raising and donations, would assume to be more innovative. Some of the reluctance had to do with the nonprofit board of directors and their personal interests while other resistance came from the usual suspects of lack of internal resources, time or a process to innovate.

In the process of sharing some ideas for incremental innovation, it became apparent that there were several less risk adverse nonprofits that had actually been quite innovative in developing new services. Some of these were the direct result of engaging the customer in eliminating their process pain points as services that the nonprofit could provide. A few of these included: product labeling rework from Chinese manufactured purchased goods, document shredding, laundry and janitorial services. It was apparent from the discussions that the most innovative non-profits were those that established a good client relationship and understood where they could add value to the customer’s supply chain. We then discussed the idea of recycling as an up and coming value-add to help meet a customer’s internal objectives while helping the environment and potentially eliminating customer landfill costs by collecting scrap that could be sold by the non-profit. The ideas generated spurred quite a discussion and what started out as a theoretical topic turned into a great discussion with useful ideas for the attendees. Taking a step back in your organization to have similar discussions can be a great first step toward innovation and can release creativity that can ultimately lead to increased profits (or reinvested proceeds as the nonprofits like to call it).