Open Innovation: Accessing The Best and Brightest Minds to Solve Community Challenges

Later this week, the Southeastern Council of Foundations (SECF) will host its annual meeting.  Like most conferences, this meeting will give members the opportunity to meet, connect, learn and share.

TPF will be participating on many fronts. I have the pleasure of co-presenting with Byron Harrell, CEO of Baptist Community Ministries, and Managing Partner with Philoptima Consulting and Debra Jacobs, President and CEO of The Patterson Foundation. We will be discussing the evolution of TPF's Caregiver Connect Initiative (from a medical model dementia focus to an educational dementia priority to a caregiver connect vision), and how a significant aspect of the evolution came from our use of open innovation, social media, and crowdsourcing.

This presentation will be uniquely fun because it focuses on the process we employed and the opportunities for foundations to engage experts quickly and efficiently. In our example, we had a need to understand the dementia space fairly quickly, however, we didn’t want to hire staff to do this. We engaged Philoptima, an organization that creates an avenue for organizations to identify and engage experts….and not just one expert, but a number of experts. These experts provide solutions to the challenges presented.

Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc. are all tools that can make a foundation much more effective and efficient.  If you are going to attend the SECF conference, please come to our presentation on Friday at 9:15am.