About the Alliance for Innovation
 

Why the Alliance for Innovation

WORKING ACROSS BOUNDARIES FOR BETTER COMMUNITIES IN A GLOBAL WORLD.

Those of us in public service know that the challenges facing our organizations and the communities we serve will accelerate in complexity and severity as the 21st century unfolds. 

The impacts on our communities and the constraints on the ability of our organizations to respond may appear local, but they are not.  We are part of a global network of activity and change, interdependence, and transformation. 

Our Changing World
We can see the effects of this expanding and deepening global network in the rise of China and India, melting arctic ice and global warming, religious strife and non-state groups influencing foreign policy or inciting terror, avian bird flu and AIDS, calls for a fence along the border with Mexico, the disappearance of pension systems and runaway health care costs, tax limitation measures like the recent property tax legislation in Florida, cheaper TV sets, and exotic foods and ethnic restaurants in small towns across America.  

Our world is changing fast.  What got us here will not carry us across the future that is unfolding within our communities and local governments.  We need new ideas and practices; applied research tested for effectiveness and relevance; and a process for getting those innovations into the hands of local government professionals and community leaders.

A Need for Change
The Innovation Groups (IG), founded in 1979, served over the past generation as a key vehicle for sharing innovations and best practice among member cities and counties.  What became clear to the IG Board of Directors was that the demands of the 21st century for innovation, change, effective local government, and healthy communities required a widening and deepening of IG’s reach and relevance.  As originally structured, on its own IG did not have the capacity to grow and expand to meet the range of issues its varied membership faced.

IG could not stay as it was and be the source for local government solutions and innovations. The ability of IG to serve as both an incubator for innovation and network for creative cities and counties to come together and learn was at risk.

A Unique Partnership
So IG reached out to the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and Arizona State University (ASU) and its School of Public Affairs, to join with IG as partners in its mission to transform local government and advance community excellence through the discovery and application of leading ideas and practices.

We recognized local governments needed to invest greater energy in discovering new solutions to local government problems and a rigorous discipline to assess, test and deploy solutions was essential.

Through this unique partnership, IG transformed into the Alliance for Innovation.  The strengths that ICMA and ASU bring and the Alliance’s structure creates a special collaborative forum for learning, measured risk taking, exploration and discovery, and sharing of knowledge and experience.

Connecting, Connecting, Connecting

ARE YOU PLUGGED IN?

The Alliance for Innovation, as a partnership of The Innovation Groups, ICMA, and Arizona State University, has created the widest and deepest innovation based network serving local government. It’s all about connections.

Finding Solutions Together
Building on IG’s rich tradition of regional networking, organization-wide membership, thought-provoking learning opportunities and personalized member services, the Alliance brings professionals, local governments, academics, and private sector partners together to discover and apply the best ideas, practices and solutions to the challenges confronting local government and communities.

Regional Representation
At present, the Alliance has 5 regions that deliver personalized service to members and allow convening of forums and learning events with peer communities that are convenient and cost effective.

They are: IG East (Charlotte, NC); IG Southeast (Tampa, FL); IG Midwest (Kansas City, KS); IG South (Dallas/Fort Worth, TX); IG West (Phoenix, AZ).  Link to our regional map (link to region.asp) to contact your director.

The organization-wide membership that comes with joining the Alliance also provides an environment for managers, department heads, front-line employees, and elected officials to connect, explore, learn, and innovate to improve their organizations and communities.  The Alliance membership structure creates a unique setting and “safe-haven” for bringing diverse perspectives and roles together for measured risk-taking, experimentation, and organizational change and service improvement.

Using Synergy to Your Advantage

The Alliance allows us to bring in the strengths and advantages of ICMA, the professional association that represents 8,000 current and former managers. Together, there is greater synergy and efficiency in advancing our shared goals of leadership and management innovation.

The national network of leading academics that ASU is assembling around a research agenda to directly serve the needs and issues of local governments, as defined by local governments, connects the academy with practitioners in a whole new way.

There are unique opportunities that the Alliance will be able to leverage, from economies of scale through shared resources to the ability to mine grant and private sector funding for best and next practice research and innovation, due to the power of the Alliance and the breadth and depth of its reach.

Connections, connections, connections…

Edge Ideas and Discovery

ANSWERING THE CALL OF DISCOVERY

We recognize the dramatic changes taking place across the globe and in the organizations and communities we serve as local government professionals.  The forces at play are so profound and the stakes are so high, we must discover new ways of shaping our organizations and communities.  Much of what we need does not yet exist.  We must discover it or invent it.

Shaping Our Future
This discovery requires, in Covey’s language, time spent in quadrant 2 work.  The demands of the world local government inhabits push us into quadrant 1 (crisis management) and quadrant 3 (routine).  There are good and understandable reasons why this happens.  But how can we improve the fate of our communities and regions without local government leadership of the highest order?

Local government professionals must make the time to create a future of conscious choice that serves people, the planet, and generates real and sustainable improvement in people’s lives, organizations, and communities. 

This is the great promise of the Alliance for Innovation, where ideas become the answers that can change the world.

The writer Wendell Berry has contrasted the concept of an “ownership society” with the idea of the “membership society,” where people chose to participate and belong and where problems are solved in community.  The Alliance is an invitation to membership of that sort. 

The Alliance, at its heart, is a community.  In the Alliance, the only really true obstacle to membership is the willingness to join and participate.

Going to the Edge
The challenge and the further invitation of the Alliance is participation, not in the mundane, but in the exploration of ideas, new approaches and new ways of thinking and acting. The Alliance, on one level, requires going to the edge, beyond the boundary of our current knowledge and understanding.  It is only there where we will find many of the answers to the core problems of our communities and organizations.

The research agenda the Alliance is establishing with the help of ASU will have exploration and discovery as a driving force in the work of the Alliance. Members of the academy will join practitioners in defining, researching and testing new ideas.

The Alliance will establish a new Big Ideas Conference, where members from many disciplines will join local government professionals in discovery, discussion, and debate in the renaissance weekend format.  And the Alliance will begin planning for a new Innovations Journal, where leading new ideas can be shared, a kind of Harvard Business Review for local government.

There will be many other forums, as the Alliance explores the edge of current knowledge and understanding.  It is not the sole mission of the Alliance, but it is critical to our identity and purpose.  The invitation to our members is not to sit on the sidelines and watch but to participate directly in this adventure.