Adaptive Blueprinting

This is a copy-paste from a thread discussion forum Social-Edge a blog for social entrepreneur. This is a post from an entrepreneur whose NGO runs on principles that is similar to what I have in mind!

"Dave Johnson said, "I'm not a firm believer in reinventing the wheel for the sake of innovation."

And Bill Clinton once said during his presidency, "Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The frustration is that we can't seem to replicate those solutions anywhere else."

Both of these quotes illustrate perfectly why the organization I run, Global Gain, has been developing a new open-source framework and set of tools to enable social entrepreneurs, NGOs/CSOs, to adopt and adapt the existing solutions of others rather than re-invent the wheel. We call the whole process Adaptive Blueprinting (AB), because it first requires the organization that has created an innovative and proven program-model to create a relatively simple "blueprint" that can be transmitted to others in a way that makes sense. Since these blueprints have a high degree of built-in flexibility, partner organizations are free to adapt them based on local contexts.

John also had a great quote with respect to this point. "successful organizations certainly need to have the flexibility that allows them to be able to embrace innovative approaches when they do work." I would turn that around a bit and say that the creators of innovative approaches need to allow enough flexibility for partners to modify and adapt when they're willing to adopt the original approach.

We hope others will find Adaptive Blueprinting perfect partnership-building "tool", especially if the goal is scaling social impact by replicating proven ideas and models. And again, I should emphasize that it is an "open-source" idea, so if anyone is interested in learning more, please send me a message via Social Edge."