Giving Compass' Take:

• Stanford Social Innovation Review discusses three guiding principles for NGOs looking to find where they best fit within government run systems and ensure long-term innovative impact.

• How can we share more insightful steps to creating innovation within government systems? How will this change over time? 

• Here's an example of 5 key questions to shape your philanthropy or NGO roadmap.

“A good tennis player can play with a broom and still win their matches,” a former tennis coach once told me.

Later I learned Roger Federer—in many minds, the most naturally gifted player of all time—spent years working with the sports equipment manufacturer Wilson to build a perfectly honed racket head for his game; designed with a “sweet spot” on the strings which made the most of his type of shots.

Since the founding of STiR—an NGO that uses networks to motivate teachers and teacher-support officials within governments—nearly seven years ago, we’ve been playing with a proverbial broom, not quite knowing where we best fit within government-run education systems.

Today, we know everything in our operating model—including our values, measurement approach, and people-development strategies—needs to align to achieve a genuine system learning partnership. We rely on three guiding principles:

  1. People are the solution, not just conduits to drive processes.
  2. We need to design for system conditions that optimize interventions.
  3. Creating genuine partnerships is enormously demanding in terms of culture—but so worth it.

Read the full article about finding innovation within government systems by Sharath Jeevan, Reinier Terwindt, James Townsend & Nithya Gurukumar at Stanford Social Innovation Review