When Jumpstart published The Jewish Innovation Economy, the landmark survey of the Jewish innovation space, the editors, Joshua Avedon and Shawn Landres, included any organization founded between 2000-2010 in the survey. Their intent was not to capture all manifestations of Jewish innovation, or to assert that innovation as a phenomenon was or should be confined to new organizations, but in the field of professional discourse, that’s exactly what happened. Innovation has turned into an adjective to describe the age of an organization, when in fact, innovation is the engagement in new approaches to creating value, and it belongs in all of our organizations, regardless of size or age.
I believe that we’re terrified of innovation. At some point perhaps about twenty years ago, the communications revolution began to upend our world. The Jewish community’s institutions, built for a time when communication was expensive and slow, would face the enormous challenge of redefining their goals and purpose in the face of this new reality. Clay Shirky, in his seminal book, Here Comes Everyone, makes the point that abundance is far more disruptive to existing structures than scarcity. What’s cheap today is communication, and it is enormously disruptive.
Cheap communication means that collective philanthropy is less appealing. It means that the individual is much more powerful. People can read reports and review organizational tax returns and know so much more about the organizations they might choose to invest in, and the problems they are trying to solve. With the advent of social networks, individuals also have a much bigger megaphone for sharing their views. Disruptive communication technology enabled “pull” to beat “push” communication. In a “push” model, there are few channels, mostly owned by content-creators and distributors, who carefully curate and broadcast their content. The “pull” model that has supplanted it empowers the individual to select the content she wants to engage with and groups she wishes to join from a multitude of distribution channels that are not controlled by content creators. This model enables networks of people to form to achieve some goal, and then disappear, only to coalesce again around a related goal, without any central coordinating body broadcasting a singular message. Everyone gets to play the role of rabbi, town crier, philanthropist, and TV network executive.
The power of individuals disrupts the normal order of business at mainstream institutions. Individualism, the casting off of denominational labels and group affiliations, shatters traditional business models and conceptions of the role of community. Regrettably, the first reaction of our organizations was to misunderstand the way that the world was changing, and to be indifferent or even hostile to change. This was not inevitable, but it was Jewish business leaders who proved to be more adept at harnessing new technologies and seizing new opportunities than their counterparts in professional leadership positions at Jewish organizations. Many of our brightest social entrepreneurs struck out on their own and built organizations around the surging power of the individual. Organizations such as G-dcast, Storahtelling, Mechon Hadar and Kevah came into their own powered by loose networks of affiliated artists, educators, and community organizers coordinated more by conviction and a new cooperative culture than by traditional bureaucratic organizational principles.
Though some of those new organizations have flourished, most have not. Few have scaled, most continue to leverage the personality and network of a charismatic founder, and while all promise to be replicable, few have in fact replicated. It is fair to wonder whether this proliferation of small, personality-driven and fragile organizations is even the right model for propagating innovation throughout our system.
Innovation is a strategy for adapting to change. It’s a deep idea that impacts the culture, structure and process of an organization. It’s not something you can isolate, put in a Petri dish called the Innovation Ecosystem, and then incubate carefully. Innovation describes a host of possibilities, from reengineering basic business processes to reimagining your very mission and the paradigms by which you organize your world. Moreover, innovation is not optional! We can’t outsource it to a few young and eager activists in their own small startup, and then carry on in our “grown-up” organizations the way things always were. We’ve placed innovation into a silo in the Jewish community, as though to inoculate ourselves from its effects. Is there a clearer example of how backward our thinking is?
Enormous changes have already taken place in our community. Intermarriage has moved from taboo to banal. Israel divides us across generations, where once it united us across religious denominations A great resurgence of interest in Torah study, prayer, and ritual has been accompanied by a steep and queasy drop in synagogue affiliation and Hebrew school enrollment. More power has shifted into the hands of fewer individuals, blurring the roles of policy-makers and funders even further. Private foundations and donor-advised funds, which give individual donors greater control over allocations, have proliferated, while collective philanthropic vehicles like Federation annual campaigns have declined. The new world of the web, data, and email demands that we conceive of new job descriptions and hire individuals with new skills in IT, analytics, community management, network weaving, evaluation and more. Nobody is exempt from the innovation imperative.
To truly innovate effectively, we need to lower the barriers for trying new ideas and learning from them. Not every new initiative needs to be an organization, and just as importantly, not every large organization needs a multi-tiered bureaucracy. True learning depends on identifying appropriate metrics, measuring them frequently, and being relentless in your pursuit of effectiveness. Does our system today support such an approach? Can we point to our most cherished organizations and say that they truly support a culture of learning, of innovation, and of excellence? Can we clearly articulate the goals of the organizations we support, explain how we measure that success, and describe how we adjust when we learn that we are falling short?
Those of us who are privileged to sit as funders have a unique opportunity and responsibility. Don’t limit yourself to investing in new ideas. Instead, be open to investing in the infrastructure that supports the possibility of innovation wherever it is need. Don’t look for innovation organizations or 2nd-stage funds as a way to diversify your portfolio of charitable investment. Instead, orient towards the goal of helping our community and our organizations, regardless of size and age, adapt to this radically new era of human history. We need to build a data-driven culture of transparent experimentation, clarity in our goals, and shared learning. That’s at the heart of innovation and innovation is the key to the survival and strength of the Jewish community. We must not let fear deter us from embracing it, in all its forms, and in all of our organizations and initiatives.