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Two Myths about Innovation

This piece originally appeared in the Harvard Crimson.

Ideas are the cornerstone of the American economy. When good ideas prevail, everyone wins. But the market for good ideas is saturated, and it’s hard to compete. There’s even a market of ideas for how to break into the market of ideas. As a new innovator myself, I’m a consumer in this market, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s broken: We constrain innovation by defining it narrowly.

The first constraint on innovation derives from how people think about non-profit versus for-profit enterprises. A few weeks ago, I attended a Harvard Innovation Lab event called “Writing a Great Challenge Proposal: Last Minute Advice from Former Finalists” designed to help students prepare for the President’s Challenge. During the event, an entrepreneur asked the panel of experts how a non-profit could meet the i-Lab competition’s sustainability and profitability criteria. One panelist responded, “Don’t start a non-profit,” led the all-male panel in a round of laugher, and then added an unconvincing “just kidding.”

This was infuriating to me. I am working with a group of graduate students on a non-profit called CommonLit.org that creates free resources for middle school literacy teachers. The panelist’s comment embodied a perspective we have run into in subtler forms over the past five months (although i-Lab Managing Director Gordon Jones proved wonderfully supportive after we reached out to him). Many people in the innovation sphere think that the business world does innovation best. They also assume that the structures that work in the for-profit arena should be applied to everyone, in every sector. These people seem to believe that for an innovation to be truly innovative, its creators must figure out a way to effect positive change and turn a profit at the same time.

When we started CommonLit, we considered for-profit status, and we probably could have made a great deal of money by selling our product to school districts—the curriculum market is huge. But we decided that because our idea had the potential to dramatically improve education throughout the country, it would be unconscionable to put our product behind a paywall. That’s why we incorporated as a non-profit and made our resource free for everyone. ...

To read the complete piece, visit the Harvard Crimson.

 

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