Blog
Thinking about Starting up a Co-op?
Starting a new business and wondering if a cooperative structure might be right for you? Co-ops are a great option for all sorts of businesses, agriculture and knowledge-workers alike. Here are some tips to help you explore your options.
Evolving through Experimentation
Implicit in the idea of innovation is a word that’s less likely to be bandied around as a desired goal – failure. By investing in smart and strategic experiments, you can improve the evolutionary potential of your organization’s – if you have aligned your experiments with your organization’s mission.
Impact Vanguard Episode 4: Evolving through Experimentation
Undergoing massive change all the time is unsettling and can be unproductive. However, organizations need to be primed to enable change.
Building a Car, Here is the Key
What can we do to create effective environments to solve multi-stakeholder problems?
Impact Vanguard Episode 3. Building a Car: Here is the Key
Social entrepreneurship is a team-building journey, kind of like building a car. My job is to figure out what kind of conveyance an organization needs to do its work, and at the end, handing over the keys.
Rooting Social Ventures in Communities they Serve
Entrepreneurial ventures with a central societal mission are critical for solving problems that cannot or are not addressed by traditional businesses, government, or non-profit organizations. Rooting these ventures in communities ensures relevance, develops trust, and builds the foundation for long-term social impact.
Impact Vanguard Episode 2. Rooting Mission-Driven Organizations: Listening is the Key
Entrepreneurial organizations with a central social mission are critical for solving societal problems that cannot or are not addressed by traditional businesses, government, or non-profit organizations. Rooting them in communities ensures relevance, builds trust, and builds the foundation for long-term social impact. These organizations must partner with communities and stakeholders to test interventions and monitor change.
Governance Drives Mission Relevance for Social Ventures
Stakeholder governance is not only critical for the management of social ventures; it’s also the driving force that ensures community engagement and mission relevance.
The Impact Vanguard - Episode 1: Driving Mission through Values-Based Governance
Community and stakeholder governance not only helps mission-driven organizations run well; it’s also the driving force that separates mission-driven organizations from everyone else. But how can you most effectively engage with these audiences?
A Guide to Building a Thriving Business
You have dreams of opening your own business, but maybe you’re not sure where to start? Each year, countless entrepreneurs find themselves at the same crossroads. But starting and succeeding with a business doesn’t have to be overly complicated.
Virtual Innovation
In the kerfuffle and smash of returning to the office, I took an informal poll of virtual workplace innovations that have really hit the mark. Here are three wondrous inventions that we should hybridize into our regular routines, whether we stay home or go back — or both.
Research is Chaordic: Let’s Recognize its Many Splendors
Researchers are some of the most innovative people in the world, and yet continue to use a hundreds-year old framework to share findings and measure impact. With growing emphasis on core tenets of rigor and reproducibility, researchers are finally starting to see value in many forms of innovative activity.
Groundhog Day: The Plight of Postdoctoral Researchers
Let’s drive innovation by re-envisioning postdoctoral research as a fixed term “Tour of Duty”, with embedded offboarding, alumni services, and access to “Veteran’s benefits” for all who participate.
Dichotomies: Rituals and Innovation in the Workplace
In many ways, the 2020 workplace offers a unique opportunity to explore what “office” means. Virtual offices are exposing assumptions and false dichotomies.
Creating an equitable credit economy that drives research collaboration
Journal articles are the gold standard for crediting research progress. But, like global trade, tying in to a fixed standard limits wealth distribution and innovation. It is time for the community to adopt a credit model that honors collaboration and drives innovation.
What is it? Is working from home awesome or awful?
A number of studies on working from home have come out recently, many with headlines about how awful the WFH experience has been, particularly for working women with school-age kids. My question: do people dislike working from home in general, or is it working from home specifically during the COVID lockdown that rankles? I looked at three opinion studies carried out this year in April, May, and July, and dug into longitudinal data collected by the US Census and US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Building equity, diversity, and sovereignty into data infrastructures
How to build equity, diversity, and sovereignty into data infrastructures is the critical issue of our time. Join Mighty Red Barn for a webinar co-sponsored by Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA), the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network (USIDSN), and ORCID on 20 August 2020 to learn more about tools that you can use today that support indigenous data sovereignty.
Launching Mighty Red Barn
I am launching Mighty Red Barn because I’d like to live in a world where people and communities are more important than profit.
Change starts here
Ready to discover how you can amplify the impact of your organization?