"ahead of the evidence and in front of the science" How do you measure social innovation?
Innovation is being sought in many fields to create new approaches and to move ideas from incubation into operation. The expanding fields of social innovation and entrepreneurship have inspired new approaches for agencies to work together to develop fresh ways of meeting pressing social and health needs.
Across the world philanthropic trusts and foundations have engaged with social entrepreneurs and communities to fund effective and practical solutions in diverse fields such and health, education, housing, financing, social justice. Funders from the public, private and philanthropic sectors in New Zealand are increasingly being drawn to invest in innovative projects, however the methods of evaluating these projects or measuring the return on investment are limited.
Traditional methods of programme evaluation or measurement are usually independent and involve the use of methods that rely on consistency, repetition and often separation, with a reliance on numerical and financial data. When assessing the impact or success of innovative projects this approach is often inadequate as the emerging and promising impacts are not captured and reflected in the evaluation findings.
Developmental Evaluation
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This emerging area of innovation has also given rise to a new way of thinking about measurement and evaluation that is intended to serve and sustain innovation. Michael Quinn Patton (2006), is a leading thinker in the area of evaluation of complex and innovative projects and has described what he is calling developmental evaluation. |
Developmental evaluation is in itself is a developing concept, an evaluation that takes place in situations where goals and outcomes are not predetermined, but rather evolve as learning occurs. Patton notes social innovators are "likely to be ahead of the evidence and in front of the science".
Developmental evaluation processes include asking evaluative questions and gathering information to provide feedback and support developmental decision making and course corrections along the emergent path. The approach integrates creativity and critical thinking, involving long term partnering relationships between the evaluators and the innovators and is designed to nurture developmental, emergent, innovative and transformative processes. It also signals a shift in the traditional roles of funder and provider as NGOs themselves take on more responsibility for demonstrating that they are remaining true to their vision, that they are ‘walking the talk’ and that they are actually making a positive difference in people’s lives.
In Canada the McConnell Foundation have begun an exploration of the use of developmental evaluation with a number of agencies who are running test and pilots (Gamble 2007).
Other Links
Social Innovation: What It Is, Why It Matters and How It can be Accelerated by Geoff Mulgan with Simon Tucker, Rushanara Ali and Ben Sanders (Skoll Centre Oxford Said Business School 2007).
In and out of sync: The challenge of growing social innovations (Sept 2007)
This report is about how social innovations spread and grow. It aims to provide a theoretically and empirically grounded guide for the many people involved in social innovation: innovators, funders, policy-makers and commissioners. It draws on a growing body of research on patterns of growth, and distils its conclusions into a guide to help direct scarce resources more effectively to maximise social impact.
Friedman, M. (2005) Trying Hard is not Good Enough: How to Produce Measurable Improvements for Cutomers and Communities. Trafford Publishing
The results accountability framework presented in this book and on this website http://www.resultsaccountability.com/ can be used to help NGOs improve the performance of their programmes to make them more consumer-friendly and effective. The methods can be learned and applied quickly and all the materials are free for use by non-profit organisations.
Platform Inc (2007) The Performance Story Report: 2007 National Support Work Summit
This report tells the story of how the community support work is contributing to the recovery approach being taken by mental health and addiction services in New Zedaland. The format of the report uses programme logic and stories of significant change to describe progress and performance using multiple voices and multiple lines of evidence.
