Private Innovation in the Public Interest for Collective Impact

Anita McGahan takes our Collective Impact Virtual Salon agenda to heart

It is a pleasure to announce the program on Private Innovation in the Public Interest (Pi²), an initiative of the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. Pi² supports private-sector leaders at all levels in becoming smarter, better, and more effective in working with governments to solve public problems in cities, states, federal agencies, and international agencies.

I have spent virtually my entire adult life teaching students and conducting research on how leaders in the private sector engage taken on the most critical challenges around us to improve lives. Still, it wasn’t until I engaged with Beth Noveck’s Governance Lab that I truly understood how completely this agenda overlapped with priorities in the public sector.

Through that work at the Governance Lab – and now at the Burnes Center for Social Change – I began the decades-long collaboration that has led to Pi². The purpose of this project is to pull together the best insights available on what we need to accomplish to tackle this century’s most significant problems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, human health issues, authoritarianism, corruption, ineffective education, and inaccessibility in health systems (to name just a few). This work is grounded in the belief that finding sustainable solutions to important public problems will require an all-hands-on-deck effort from motivated and inspired leaders from both the private and public sectors who are prepared to work together to accomplish things that cannot occur any other way.

The framework that I use to guide the conversations that are available on this website reflects long-standing ideas from the field of Strategy on how to design organizations so that they are effective over the long run. The first step is to identify a compelling aspiration that is narrow enough to be actionable but broad enough to be inspiring and important. The second is to identify exactly which stakeholders are touched by the aspiration, and the third is to get concrete about how to create value for them with excellence. The fourth requirement is to pull together the resources to demonstrate proof-of-concept and scalability of an innovative solution, and the fifth is to scale the approach in ways that make it sustainable on a range of levels: financially, organizationally, and culturally.

The conversations here also emphasize the importance of feedback loops between these stages. When the five elements of effective Strategy are complementary and reinforcing, the system sets off a flywheel effect that makes an innovation coherent and effective. Each of the conversations that is available here brings fresh and penetrating insights into each component of the Strategy process as well as into the links between them. Together, they show how breakthrough innovation depends on a shared commitment among partners to the hard work of building something important together over time. The potential for accomplishing this work inspired the Pi2 project.