Semantic Viewpoint: A Discourse on Innovation Technologies

The Small Non-Profit Connection

By Zachary Alexander
The IT Investment Architect®

Hand holding cable connections Executives from small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) are always looking for partnerships to extend their company’s capabilities. These partnerships and/or tools can be called productivity multipliers if the partnerships and/or tools allow SMEs to obtain business innovations without taking on the entire development cost. The most promising productivity multipliers lie in developing relationships with non-profits. This is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that many of the traditional organizations that have supported SMEs in the past have switched to helping e-Government initiatives.

The good news is that small non-profit organizations are becoming the new productivity multipliers. They are filling the vacuum left by the traditional supporters of the SME community. Most of these new productivity multipliers are staffed by fewer than ten paid employees and have budgets of less then one hundred-thousand U.S. dollars. Executives would be well-advised to look for non-profits with leaders that are willing to aggressively undertake a greater stewardship role. Executives should be looking for non-profit leaders who are willing to become experts in the development and distribution of industry-specific innovation. Here are three ways to judge the stewardship characteristics of non-profits:

Does the non-profit organization proactively recruit tool builders? Tool builders make new productivity applications understandable to common users. When the Internet was first commercialized, the development of web pages was a complex project and required special training. Engineers were needed to produce web pages because of the requirement to combine complicated graphic technologies with equally complicated manual HTML programming. The amount of content soared, as well as the commercial viability of the Internet, after tool builders created special purpose graphic editors. This allowed common users without special training to produce content that they could then easily share with their peers. All productivity initiatives would benefit from this kind of effort by a dedicated group of tool builders tasked with the responsibility of delivering necessary capabilities while reducing apparent complexity.

Does the non-profit organization encourage individual members? Individual members are the perfect productivity multipliers because they innovate using their own money. They tend to have a special commitment to either the technology enabler or the industry. Individual members offset the commercial imperative of vendors, which is to maximize profit and capture market share. They may also bring access to industry influencers that can make or break any industry productivity initiative. Larger non-profit organizations tend to discourage individual members or at least minimize their visibility. This can lead to the appearance that industry productivity initiatives are bought and paid for by large vendors and limit the adoption by small vendors. The loss of small vendors can seriously deplete the pool of champions willing to promote a given industry productivity initiative.

Does the non-profit take the steps necessary to stay industry focused? Many members of these non-profit organizations participate in development of open source projects. Open source projects are technology initiatives that are theoretically not controlled by any commercial entity. In open source projects, leading members can achieve almost rock star status. This can cause proxy battles on the part of would-be project leaders trying to use the industry productivity project to steal the limelight from another popular open source project. The technical infighting can lead to productivity projects that destroy company value by increasing the amount of company resources required for successful operational integration.