Better ways to build a better mousetrap (post #9)

People at Google sprint. Others spitball. Old-schoolers still brainstorm. And a growing minority brainwrite.

Whatever you call it, we’re all looking for better ways to build a better mousetrap.

At 100Kin10, we believe that most solutions to most problems already exist somewhere; it’s just that we don’t have practical and efficient ways of sharing them. But we know that, sometimes, even with a network of organizations as strong as 100Kin10’s, there remain challenges we have yet to solve. For those, we support our partners to adapt existing solutions and innovate new solutions.

Over the years, drawing on human-centered design; engineering and fail-fast principles like lo-fi prototypes; the wisdom of crowds; and technologies that enable crowd-funding, we have developed a particular 100Kin10 approach to adapting and innovating solutions.

Here are some key principles:

Build on the shoulders of giants. Strong solutions build on and take the best from existing solutions. Don’t waste time and money reinventing the wheel.

Design solutions, not projects. Projects are activities. They keep people busy. But they don’t necessarily solve problems. This might sound axiomatic, but you’d be shocked at how often people lose sight of this basic insight: Solutions are focused on solving specific problems.

Your user is your guide. Strong solutions are shaped by the real, lived experiences of the people who are experiencing the problem in question. They aren’t test-tube solutions.

Prototype. But do test your solution, in a low-fidelity format, with your end users, the community of people who will use the solution. Mock up the experience, create a faux-app, simulate the training — whatever you need to do to work out the kinks before you go prime-time.

And design for scale. Prototyping is not the same as piloting. As I once learned from Uri Treisman, pilots are doomed to fail when they reach escape velocity; with outsized talent, resources, and permission to experiment, pilots are designed not to reach scale. Strong solutions take scale into account from square one. Your prototype can’t require more resources than you’ll have at scale. (In the non-profit space, this most often is about human, not financial, resources, and time.)

We support partners to innovate in three ways:

1.We host an annual problem-solving fellowship. Each year is focused on one concrete challenge based on the map of grand challenges that partners co-created with us. Partners participate in a 6–9 month human-centered design fellowship, in which they explore the dimensions of that one challenge from the perspective of both the end-user and the research; prototype and test solutions; get feedback from experts and end-users; and apply for funding to bring their solution to market. Watch participants talk about the fellowship in these awesome, short videos shot by the uber-talented team at BIF, our original partner in creating the fellowship.

2. We work with partners to identify a shared need and support them to co-invest funds to bring a shared solution to market. Three times, for a total of nearly $1M raised, with the median investment in the range of $3,000, 100Kin10 has facilitated nearly 100 partners to collectively commission a solution to a shared problem. These solutions have collectively reached millions of people.

  • The first resulted in an edgy and original national campaign, crafted for individualized use by 30+ diverse organizations, to recruit STEM undergraduates to become STEM teachers. Dubbed Blow Minds, Teach STEM, its animated music video and irreverent career quiz and website reached 16M people on Twitter, garnered 50K+ video plays, and was picked up by TED, Upworthy, DoSomething, YouTube Nation, GOOD, and others.
  • The second resulted in a cutting-edge toolkit that included a set of nationally-tested messages and talking points about college-and career-ready standards; sample blog posts, emails, social media posts, op-eds, and FAQs, all ready to be plagiarized; and a step-by-step guide for how to apply this research to speak to parents, teachers, students, and the general public about the new, higher standards. The toolkit has influenced hundreds of organizations and policymakers around the country to strengthen their teacher- and parent-facing communications. Many of them have used the toolkit to train their own leaders to communicate in more effective ways about the standards. Through this work, the toolkit’s research-based messages have reached tens of thousands of teachers and parents.
  • The third resulted in a coordinated organizing and communications campaign to prioritize STEM and STEM teachers in the state education plans that resulted from the Every Student Succeeds Act. Eighteen 100Kin10 partners co-invested in the “Every Student Succeeds with STEM” effort, producing a shared set of messages and talking points, a campaign aimed at grasstops and grassroots engagement, and a shared set of policy principles and recommendations. From mid-December’s launch to the end of February 2017, the campaign hub, which hosts all of the resources developed and collected, had been visited nearly 14,000 times.

3. We provide small and fast micro-grants to enable partners to meet face-to-face, learn from one another in order to adapt existing solutions to unique contexts, and advance work on commitments, including collaborating on new projects. Since 2012, we’ve awarded 84 collaboration grants — totaling almost $375,000 — to enable over 100 organizations to learn and innovate together; these have leveraged literally millions of dollars in follow-on support, as well as improvements of all kinds, from redesigned programs to new partnerships.

In addition, we’ve partnered with IDEO’s Teachers Guild in the fall of 2016 to support teachers to design their own solutions to make STEM learning more active for their students. The collaboration yielded 130 ideas created by teachers and to be implemented by teachers in their classrooms.

These investments have yielded dividends, and we continue to take in evidence of their success in order to improve them, so that we can support partners to adapt existing solutions and innovate new ones, for the betterment of STEM teaching and learning in schools around the country.

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Talia Milgrom-Elcott
100Kin10’s Experiments in Networked Impact

Breaking the mold on how cross-sector organizations can collaborate to solve wicked, systemic problems.