Hello! I’m Jacki Purtell, Senior Data Intelligence Analyst with VentureWell’s Data Intelligence team. VentureWell is a national nonprofit headquartered in Hadley, Massachusetts, that specializes in funding, training, and cultivating a pipeline of science and technology inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Together with our partners, we are driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges and create positive social and environmental impact.
Innovation is evaluation: problem identification, solution formulation, development, testing, launch. As evaluators, we want to understand why innovations catalyze change. This has become important as innovation hubs are being built through deliberate convergence of policy, community needs and engagement, expertise, and building interdependent pathways that accelerate inclusive innovation, rather than by coincidence.
Developmental evaluation (DE) (as structured by Michael Quinn Patton) is an ongoing practice, helping build something new amidst uncertainty. Formulating evaluation for innovation ecosystems around DE recognizes that ecosystem building is nascent, emerging about a decade ago. While there is an understanding of what innovation ecosystems need for success, less is understood about how innovation ecosystems create change across communities, partnerships, and areas of technology. As innovation ecosystems form, DE helps ecosystems learn about success in their local context and emerging best practices that can inform ecosystems more generally.
Designing innovation ecosystem evaluation, we recognize that impacts – strengthened community socioeconomics, increased cohesiveness, expanded educational opportunities, structured workforce development, etc. – are not reached through prescriptive activities, but through approaches and activities that acknowledge local assets, early successes, and evolving partnerships.
The principles of DE align with innovation ecosystem development goals and address the uncertainty that accompanies network building. Our approach is:
- Systems thinking: Evaluate to understand how innovation reflects interconnectedness – the educational, workforce, and economic environments that incubate ideas and technologies. Help ecosystems understand their values and align them with appropriate outcomes and measures (i.e., balance knowledge sharing with commercialization).
- Complexity perspective: Interconnectedness amplifies how innovation creates change. Innovation addresses a critical need; addressing that need begins a series of changes. Consider from the beginning the impact of these ripple effects.
- Co-creation: Co-creation requires trust; join innovators as early as invited. Become part of the ecosystem; hear perspectives from all participants, those in research and those in commercialization. Improve effectiveness as part of the network and early goal setting.
- Utilization focus: Identify when partners want to interpret findings together and when to provide interpretations or recommendations. Balance co-creation with evaluative rigor, and support practical, informed, well-constructed decision making across diverse partnerships.
- Developmental purpose: Success is commercialization and utility, shared knowledge and community impact. Look for evidence that innovation contributes to change for the better across the ecosystem.
- Evaluation rigor: Recognize scope of partnerships in the ecosystem. Construct evaluations that borrow from academia, industry, community development, and ecosystem goals using processes of collective impact.
- Timely feedback: Learn organically through ongoing assessment. Document how change creates program history and positively impacts the goals of networked innovation.
- Innovation niche: Anticipate unknown outcomes emerging from complexity and uncertainty. Facilitate discussions that provide a why. Help determine how innovation ecosystems evolve.
VentureWell’s use of DE is a developmental process. As we engage more deeply with innovation ecosystems, we adapt our process to encourage innovators to understand the why of their work.
Rad Resources
- Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use by Michael Quinn Patton (Guilford Press, 2010)
- A Developmental Evaluation Companion by Jamie Gamble, Kate McKegg, and Mark Cabaj (May 2021, McConnell Foundation)
- Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld (Wiley, 2012)
Check out our post tomorrow on focusing the evaluation design of innovation and entrepreneurship programs!
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