5. Key Resources

What are you starting with? What do you need to succeed? Your guesses about these things fill the Key Resources box on the Lean Change Canvas. There are at least five types of resources to consider as you fill out this part of the canvas:

Intellectual property. IP is traditionally underused in the social sector because, compared to businesses, nonprofits and governments can’t convert IP into money. (Businesses often formally value their IP in loan applications or stock offerings, for example.) A rigorous approach to managing the new ideas you’re creating can still add incredible value to your innovation. Trademarks are among the easiest form of IP to manage because, by law, the mark is established as soon as you start using it (and using a little ™ logo along with it).

The key is to be consistent in your use and, if you decide that trademarked IP (like logos and slogans) are critical to your success, to defend your trademark by challenging others who misuse it so that it doesn’t degrade. An example of an important but legally degraded trademark is the Ecological Footprint, arguably the best-known indicator in sustainability. Unfortunately, it’s also in the Oxford English Dictionary, and by the time your slogan makes it there it belongs to the world. That’s not always a bad thing, but if your innovation requires control over communications, quality, and brand, then a degraded trademark is a lost opportunity.

Copyright of your written materials, software, or music can protect the specific way you’ve expressed your creativity, but not the specifics of the ideas themselves, which can be redisseminated freely as long as specific pieces of language, computer code, or recordings aren’t used. In cases where you wish to protect the ideas themselves, you have to step up to treating your IP as a trade secret, protecting it in contracts or patenting it. Trade secrets can be protected with simple language in a personnel manual or through other fairly straightforward procedures that make members of your team responsible legally for not disseminating key ideas. Contracts do the equivalent for people outside your organization.

Patents are one of the more stringent ways to protect IP but, paradoxically, have often been used to ensure that key IP remains broadly available. For example, a great way to keep an idea in the public domain is to patent it and then freely license it. (For a great case of this, check out the history of wheelchairs and the Physically Disabled Students Program in Berkeley in the 1960s.) Patents can be expensive but should be considered where control over your innovation is critical to your mission, to your success, or to eventual revenue generation.

Physical assets. These are the real-world, material things you need or can deploy to succeed. Do you need an office or a staging space for your innovation? Do you have free access to space as part of your hosting organization? Like Goodwill, do you have access to large amounts of contributed goods and services? Like the National Museum of the American Indian, is there a pre-existing trove of cultural artifacts and resources that will be folded into your innovation? Think hard about what’s available to you that can help you launch, and write it down in the Key Resources box on the canvas.

Financial resources. Money is often critical to social sector startups but not always. Where will you get it? The traditional options include:

• Individual donors. This is usually where any social sector program starts, even if it’s destined for government implementation. Some group of individuals or organizations pools its resources, meager or not, to pay for the early stages of the innovation. The money raised goes to travel, to research, and to hiring a staff person or two to anchor the effort. Many innovations remain primarily funded by individual donors, either a few writing big checks (upwards of $10,000 a year) or many, many smaller donors. A donor-funded innovation must very early identify donors as explicit targets and test against its hypotheses about their giving. A big advantage of getting money from donors is the flexibility they usually allow, which is very good for lean methodologies, and the learning that lean fosters is a great way to keep a community of donors engaged as you advance your innovation.

• Foundations are a great source of startup capital, but it remains to be seen how open they will be to the experimentation necessary in the lean startup. Restrictions on what a foundation will fund, what it can fund legally, and other factors may constrain your final service or product design. Traditionally, many foundations also become more prescriptive in their funding as a startup matures, demanding narrower, measurable program outcomes. Keep this in mind as you write them into your canvas!

• Government. With federal spending alone at almost $4 trillion a year, the government is far and away the largest funder of the social sector, and you should always consider whether your innovation is destined to be government-funded in the short, medium, and long run. (The National Museum of the American Indian was an example of a startup that was born of a privately funded initiative to make NMAI an integral part of the Smithsonian Institution.) There is a multitude of ways government funding may be part of your innovation, whether you’re working within a government institution now, hoping to get a government grant or contract, or hoping to secure long-term funding for your innovation through legislative efforts.

Good will. Most social sector work is motivated not by financial gain but by social values, and the motivation behind those values is a major resource in the work. In the nonprofit sector, leaders are often acutely aware of “the case”—the charitable appeal of their work. There are “cases” that are likely to be widely held, like saving the environment or housing the indigent. Other cases may be vital to the general well-being, but will appeal to only a narrow demographic, like scientists who understand well before the general public the importance of a particularly narrow field of research. There are also “cases” that are contested in the public sphere to determine if they will become part of public policy, like healthcare. And there are “cases” that mobilize narrow constituencies to push programs into government, like certain forms of targeted subsidies.

Whatever the “case,” the pool of good will is vital to any social innovation. It’s a resource that can be cultivated as a way of generating almost every other resource on your list—money, volunteers, physical assets. As you begin to understand your social innovation, keep track of the kind of “case” it represents in the canvas.

Human resources. These resources include the staff, advisors, board members, and specific donors you need to succeed. Many times your human resources come to you, motivated by the cause or “case.” Try to be intentional as well about the people you innovate with. Find people who’ve done pieces of what you’re trying to do already and get them on board. Understand that it’s OK to test your sense of whether a person is the right fit or not as soon as possible. The best way to find out is to ask them to jump in and perform right away. As an old saying goes: “The best work you’ll ever get from someone is the work you get just before they get the job.”

Table 4.5 Sample Key Resources