After the analysis of the survey responses was complete, I found myself in a similar state of curiosity that I’d been in before the survey. There were more questions about intellectual property, management, and strategy that hadn’t been answered. Some of these questions for the basis of my ongoing study and work as a consultant. […]

Okay, my next decisions weren’t nearly life and death. But, the quality of my research choices at this point would be the difference between meaningful data and just an interesting exercise. If I was going to focus on surveying social entrepreneurs I needed to know that the definition I was using would enable me to […]

After all of that reading I knew more about intellectual property law and economics, theories of justice and knowledge, and the landscape of innovation. I did not know any more about intellectual property in nonprofit organizations, though. I took the new concepts to the library and did some new searches of the nonprofit literature. Everything […]

As capstones to my reading, these two texts helped to frame some key concepts that would move my nonprofit intellectual property questions forward. I was out of my comfort zone with Lessig’s The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World and Landes and Posner’s The Economic Structure of Property Law. […]

I really had no idea what reading about open innovation might be about, other than I thought it was loosely connected to the ideas of open source. Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm was as eye-opening about the mechanisms for innovation as Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice was thought-provoking. The concept of open innovation […]

In industry an entrepreneur is someone who innovates. In the nonprofit sector it’s no accident that certain nonprofit founders and some nonprofit organizations have been labeled social entrepreneurs or social enterprises. Though not everyone uses the terms social entrepreneur or social enterprise with innovation in mind, it technically indicates innovation in the social sector. If […]

It occurred to me that maybe I was looking for too narrow of an idea. If intellectual property is one output of innovation in industry maybe there were some hints in that literature. I went looking for starting points with the questions: I would have had an easier time drinking from a fire hose. There […]

What is ironic and wonderful is that my misread led to interpreting a blog post as a call to give away intellectual property. That misunderstanding launched the pursuit of questions I still haven’t finished asking. My questions were sparked by the idea that giving impactful programs away is the best way to scale did not […]