← All project ideas

Strategy & strategic planning

Run an innovation lab for new ideas

Signs you need an innovation lab

Your brainstorming sessions always generate the same tired ideas and you feel stuck.

What you'll achieve

We design and facilitate a participatory innovation process to help your team generate, test, and prototype creative solutions to key challenges.

How a Nonprofit Builder consultant helps

  • Design the innovation process, facilitate idea generation and selection, support rapid prototyping, and help your team decide which concepts to test, refine, or drop.

Key deliverables

  • Innovation lab design, facilitated sessions, idea pipeline and prioritisation framework, prototype concepts, next-step testing plan.

From the resource library

Free tools and guides to get started

  • 2.5C204

    Pathways to Social Impact

    A 14-page working paper from Duke's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, later revised for Stanford Social Innovation Review as "Scaling Social Impact". It asks what you are spreading (a programme, an organisation or a set of principles) and how: dissemination, loose to tight affiliation, or branching. Each option is tested against five R's: readiness, receptivity, resources, risk and return. Leaders and funders use its questions to pick a scaling path, including the option to wait.

    ClassicShort readFree
  • 2.5C208

    Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep

    A free report prepared for the McConnell Foundation and Tamarack Institute, drawn from a decade of the foundation's Applied Dissemination grants and peer learning group. It sets out three ways to spread a social innovation: scaling out to more people and places, scaling up into policy and law, and scaling deep into culture, values and relationships. It shares lessons and strategies from grantees, plus what made the peer learning process work. Teams use it to plan beyond simple replication.

    ClassicKey manual or guideFree