Collective Impact for Opportunity Youth

This report was designed to highlight the underlying challenges facing Opportunity Youth (i.e., youth between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither enrolled in school nor participating in the labor market) and offers a framework to help communities come together to address these challenges

Collective Impact

Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated intervention of individual organizations. Substantially greater progress could be made in alleviating many of our most serious and complex social problems if nonprofits, governments, businesses, and the public were brought together around a common agenda to create collective impact. Published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011

The Promise of Citywide Charter Strategies

Charter school enrollment is on the rise in many urban areas. In fact, 56% of all public charter schools are located in urban areas, and 10 of our nation's largest school districts now have 20,000 students enrolled in public charter schools. With this growth in the charter movement, there is an increasing need for local infrastructure support through technical services, advocacy, and coordination. This report examines the potential for citywide charter strategies as a key leverage point for increasing charter school quality

HR: Innovation\u27s Accelerator

[Excerpt] Amazon and Borders. Netflix and Blockbuster. Uber and taxi drivers. Digital camera makers and Kodak. The list could go on and on. Individual stories of disruptive innovation such as these are some of the most well known - and ca utionary - business tales of our times. Yet, many firms remain blindly confident that such an outcome will never happen to their company. Recent research suggests otherwise. According to a 2016 report by the innova tion -focused firm Innosight, high M&A activity and billion -dollar startup valuations are creating significant market turbulence, with 28 companies being replaced on the S&P 500 index in 2015 alone. At current churn rates, Innosight estimates that by 2026, half of the entire S&P 500 will be replaced-a staggering and sobering figure. As such, the ability to develop deep innovation capabilities has never been more important, for both growth and survival. This year\u27s CAHRs Research Assistant (RA) project takes on this very topic, examining the intersection between HR & Innovation, and how progressive HR leaders can create value and impact through a range of human capital strategies and solutions. Consistent with past CAHRS RA projects, the research methodology for this paper was qualitative in nature, including 41 interviews with HR and business executives at 31 different partner companies, all within the Fortune 500. Unique to this year\u27s project, and in addition to the traditional focus on HR leaders, research assistants also spoke with more than 10 business and innovation leaders, to get a richer, deeper view of innovation. Interviews consisted of 11 questions, but largely focused on three key categories: Why is innovation often so hard? What factors lead to innovation success? How can HR leaders be innovation change agents within their company? Our findings and recommendations follow below

Improving Access to Health Through Collaboration: Lessons Learned from The Colorado Trust's Partnerships for Health Initiative Evaluation

This report presents findings from the evaluation of four Partnerships in Health Initiative grantees that were addressing access to health in their communities through the formation of collaboratives. Outcomes achieved by the grantees as well as lessons learned for others embarking on collaborative processes are described

Building a Common Ground – The Use of Design Representation Cards for Enhancing Collaboration between Industrial Designers and Engineering Designers

To achieve success in today’s commercial environment, manufacturers have progressively adopted collaboration strategies. Industrial design has been increasingly used with engineering design to enhance competitiveness. Research between the two fields has been limited and existing collaboration methods have not achieved desired results. This PhD research project investigated the level of collaboration between industrial designers and engineering designers. The aim is to develop an integration tool for enhanced collaboration, where a common language would improve communication and create shared knowledge. An empirical research using questionnaires and observations identified 61 issues between industrial designers and engineering designers. The results were grouped and coded based on recurrence and importance, outlining 3 distinct problem categories in collaborative activity: conflicts in values and principles, differences in design representation, and education differences. A taxonomy further helped categorise design representations into sketches, drawings, models and prototypes. This knowledge was indexed into cards to provide uniform definition of design representations with key information. They should benefit practitioners and educators by serving as a decision-making guide and support a collaborative working environment. A pilot study first refined the layout and improved information access. The final validation involving interviews with practitioners revealed most respondents to be convinced that the tool would provide a common ground in design representations, contributing to enhanced collaboration. Additional interviews were sought from groups of final-year industrial design and engineering design students working together. Following their inter-disciplinary experience, nearly all respondents were certain that the cards would provide mutual understanding for greater product success. Lastly, a case study approach tested the cards in an industry-based project. A design diary captured and analysed the researchers’ activities and observations on a daily basis. It revealed positive feedback, reinforcing the benefits of the cards for successful collaboration in a multi-disciplinary environment. Keywords Industrial Design, Engineering Design, Collaboration, Design Representation, New Product Development.</p

Channeling Change: Making Collective Impact Work

Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated intervention of individual organizations. Substantially greater progress could be made in alleviating many of our most serious and complex social problems if nonprofits, governments, businesses, and the public were brought together around a common agenda to create collective impact. Published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011

Lower Mekong Portfolio: Interim Evaluation

This report summarizes a portfolio evaluation of the MacArthur Foundation's conservation investments in the Lower Mekong region since 2011. It is explicitly a portfolio-level evaluation, focusing on common themes rather than individual grants. The evaluation involved understanding the portfolio context through reviewing relevant documents and speaking with donor partners; gathering data from MacArthur grantees; calibrating initial evaluation findings through consultations with independent regional experts and donor partner grantees; improving future evaluation ability by cooperating with NatureServe to improve the Lower Mekong Dashboard; and presenting results in this evaluation report and to MacArthur directly