Welcome to GCSAE!

Cleveland, Ohio, September 1, 2009 - At ASAE & The Center’s 2007 Volunteer Leadership Retreat volunteer leaders identified innovation as an important strategic concern for ASAE & The Center. It was recommended that ASAE & The Center transform itself into a highly innovative organization pursuing innovation internally and championing innovation in the association community.

To that end, Pursuant to the recommendation, in 2008 ASAE & The Center’s Strategic Research team initiated a project to investigate what innovation is for ASAE & The Center and to develop a roadmap for innovation for ASAE & The Center and the association community. The 2008 project engaged volunteers and staff in a series of exercises and workshops to develop an innovation vision and approach for ASAE & The Center.

The 2008 project team crafted the following innovation vision for ASAE & The Center: ASAE & The Center will champion open and systematic innovation within the organization and in the association community to create value for members.
The team identified the following roles for ASAE & The Center to achieve the vision:

Play the role of an innovation champion for the association community;
Pursue innovation with rigor and discipline by adopting an appropriate set of structure, processes and metrics;
Achieve a balance between its focus on facilitating innovation in the association community and its focus on internal innovation initiatives, by placing particular emphasis on addressing issue sand challenges of common interest; and
Adopt an innovation culture that promotes diversity of thought, experimentation and learning, broad based collaboration and creative thinking in all the activities.

The 2008 project report offered two plans to achieve the ASAE & The Center’s innovation vision and role. Based on staff and project team recommendations, the Boards approved ASAE & The Center conducting a pilot project version of the “conservative approach” presented in the report (March 2009). The conservative approach focuses on enhancing ASAE & The Center’s innovation awareness prior to launching a full scale program.

The Innovation Pilot Project will utilize innovation management and strategies to explore how ASAE & The Center can offer more affordable and accessible resources and raise our understanding of innovation principles and management.   For the project, we describe innovation as an intentional management process with its own distinct set of processes, practices and tools to search for, evaluate and implement a new way, a better answer or a previously unseen possibility.

The pilot project will engage a workgroup of 10 ASAE & The Center volunteers (Board members, small staff committee members and others) representing smaller size nonprofit organizations and 11 ASAE & The Center staff in an innovation process management model.
The work group’s activities will result in recommendations to ASAE & The Center on:

•   How ASAE & The Center could better serve smaller organizations
• Considerations for developing an innovation process within ASAE & The Center

Another component of the pilot project is to explore how nonprofit organizations are using innovation processes (how innovation is practiced). Insights and learnings from the innovation pilot project will be shared with the ASAE & The Center community in 2010.
GCSAE’s Jim Hieb will serve as one of eleven volunteers on the 2009/10 Innovation Pilot Project Work Group.

About GCSAE
The Greater Cleveland Society of Association Executives (GCSAE) is a professional society of association executives, representing Northeastern Ohio’s active association community. It is an allied society of the American Society of Association Executives. GCSAE provides a vital forum on association management techniques and trends.