Fed Hosts Exploring Innovation: A Conference on Community Development Finance

An illustrator from Innovation Labs captures speaker Andrew Hargadon’s thoughts on display boards.

It was a journey that more than 200 people with open minds decided to take. They were risk-takers who came to a conference that promised them something different: There would be the usual keynote speeches and breakout sessions, but there also would be an emphasis on small group dialogues where participants could learn as much from each other as they did from the presenters.

Exploring Innovation: A Conference on Community Development Finance was all about learning how to be innovative and then applying the process to community development. The idea? That innovation helps organizations improve performance, increase access to capital and achieve scale and sustainability.

A highlight of the event was the Innovation Café, a time set aside for casual conversations after the keynote speeches. Andrew Hargadon, a professor at the University of California-Davis, and Keith Sawyer, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, spoke on innovation and the need for group creativity.

Hargadon emphasized that innovation is not the same as creativity. Innovation means adding value by applying a new idea or method to something already established. An example, he said, is Thomas Edison’s light bulb. Contrary to what many people think, Edison did not invent the light bulb. He did, however, come up with a way to improve it so it could be mass produced. The same is true of Henry Ford and the automobile and Bill Gates and the personal computer. In all these examples, social and business networks also were important, Hargadon said. Innovators need support from those around them to be successful.

Sawyer’s message hit on similar points. Great innovations in the future will not come from an individual, but from collaborations, he said. The culture of creativity and innovation involves people openly sharing ideas... small sparks of insight.

The conversations after the speeches were led by Langdon Morris, partner in Innovation Labs and an expert at facilitating collaborative processes. A key part of the process during Exploring Innovation was having an illustrator capture the speakers’ main points in text and drawings that were on display for all to see.

Other conference highlights were:

• An overview of Enterprise Community Partners’ community development work by Doris Koo, the national nonprofit’s president and CEO;
• “Breakfast with Mark” featuring Mark Pinsky of Opportunity Finance Network, who facilitated a discussion of the ideas and observations gleaned from the Innovation Café;
• a presentation by Sandra Braunstein of the Federal Reserve System on innovation and how it applies to community development and a roundtable discussion she led with John Talmage of Social Compact and Robert Weissbourd of RW Ventures;
• a speech by Thomas Dorr, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on the importance of broadband to economic development in rural areas; and
• a book signing and entertaining luncheon speech on how to sustain innovation within an organization by Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University.