Innovation Needs Iteration

By: Barbara Bellissimo

So far in 2015, we’ve been on a roll here at The Fund:

• Finishing up our three-year Common Assignment Study and launching our Next Generation Instructional Design network; 
• Expanding our support of Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teaching and Teachers (ECET2) convenings across Kentucky; 
• Launching our Innovative Teacher Leader group; 
• Expanding our board of directors to include more business leaders and representation from all regions of Kentucky; and 
• Bringing new sponsors and supporters together at our first Innovate:Education conference. 

We’ve also visited all nine education cooperatives across the state, presented at many local and national conferences, built our own contact management system, and are working on a teacher portal to make it easy for teachers to find convenings, mentors, professional development and other resources.

Our new office at 696 Teton Trail, Frankfort

But I think the thing we’ve been most excited about is our new office space. Before July 1st, we were using space very generously donated by the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce in Frankfort. As our staff and work expanded, we decided it would be easier and more efficient if we could have our own space, set up to our specifications. We found the space in June, signed the lease in July, and started to move in.

Due to unexpected delays in furniture delivery, we could not hold our first staff meeting in our new space until August 24, almost two months after we moved in! It was one of the most exciting days in The Fund’s history.






Four days later, this happened:

Luckily no one was inside the building when it happened, and the driver got out of her car and went next door to have her hair done (seriously). However, we’ve had to rethink all of our great plans for great meetings in that space for at least a month.

“Innovation does not happen on the first try. Rather, innovation is an iterative process with the goal of improving lives.” --Nathan Hall, 9Lenses

We’re busy iterating our design for using our space, and asking questions:

• How can we bring together our NGID network at the original date & time, but in a new space? 
• How can we maintain the excitement we had in our own space, as we are displaced for the next few weeks? 
• How can we work with our landlord so that this doesn’t happen again? 
• Should we rethink our use and design of the space to mitigate the risk of damage and/or injury if--God forbid--this happens again? 

Note that we are not sitting around complaining about what happened. We’re using our experience of what happened to make future experiences better. It’s a story to which we can refer when we are explaining to teachers, administrators, and business leaders what we mean by innovation and iteration.

Of course we're looking forward to getting our space to its new normal. We're even more looking forward to using this experience to improve our ability to identify scalable innovations that improve outcomes for all of Kentucky's students.