 Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here today and I'd like to share some insights about innovation from our work and perhaps challenge some of your understandings as innovation as we know it. When we think about innovation we often think about the lone experimenter, the scientist who's spending time alone by himself or herself waiting for that moment of Eureka discovery. Well as we look deeper into that really what happens with innovation it's a much more network phenomena and it's about connections. A lot of my work comes from Dr. Andy Hargidon at UC Davis with whom I run our Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and we're undertaking numerous studies of social sector innovation that work that's happening at the intersection of business and government and nonprofits. I'm going to share some of those insights as well as some of my insights from teaching social entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley. What we're finding as you might expect is that the process of innovation is so much less about the discovery but more about the connections, the collaboration, the connections often the unusual connections between people and institutions. Often if you ask the people that we work with the scientists and inventors within the university environment we work with a lot of these smart folks and we say collaborate here she'll work with others with the same skill set that look or act or have similar training to the way that he or she has. Well what we're talking about when we're forming connections is finding those unusual partners those people that can bring new insights and perspectives about how to do things. I'm gonna I'm gonna touch on this from some historical examples and then I'll bring it into the forward to the present day around social sector innovation. So this is probably one of the most important innovations of the last hundred years the commercialization of penicillin and this gentleman here Dr. Fleming is often credited with being the inventor of penicillin but when you look more closely at the history of this discovery we've actually known about penicillin for about 2,000 years. It goes back to when Persians would use this the moldy bread and put it on wounds to slow down infection. So the idea of discovering penicillin is almost absurd. We've known about it for a very long time. The real history of of of penicillin is this man and in he Dr. Fleming brought penicillin and brought it to scale and took it from a lab experiment and brought it to basically where in five years it was we were producing billions of doses of penicillin in a very short amount of time and the question really is how did that happen and it's a network building phenomena. If you look at Flory's connections he took his work that some of the work that had priorly done with Alexander Fleming and brought it outside of Oxford, brought it to the United States, brought it to international labs with pharma companies, many others, built out a very diverse network that could scale and take that innovation to a place that could be a transformative and truly innovative product whereas Fleming saw the initial work really as very much a lab experiment and kept it within the lab and so the real you know innovation was not the discovery it was the scaling and building out of the partnerships. We see this in so many historical examples of innovation the light bulb wasn't invented by Edison we knew that the technology had existed for about 50 years before he so-called invented it. What his innovation was was building out the network that could support it and make it endure for so long even the the assembly line from Ford he didn't invent it he took the ideas and recombined them from the disassembly plants at the time the slaughterhouses and learned and recombined to discover the idea of the assembly line. There's a little theory behind this this is important for us as social sector leaders and this comes from the work of Ronald Burt around strong ties and weak ties. Burt talks about strong ties as those people and those organizations that you know well and those are important for innovation for sure but more importantly are those weak ties those ties to bodies of knowledge to institutions to organizations that will give you insight into whole other ways of thinking they'll help you learn what you don't know you don't know and the most innovative companies organizations foundations nonprofits have many weak ties to other bodies of knowledge that truly is transformative in in the work that's done. To ground this in some examples locally and internationally one of the great organizations that does this so well is here's Delancey Street Foundation and this is Mimi Silver who for almost 40 years has taken this her approach and working with her population she works with ex-cons with drug addicts and truly a social change model that wasn't based on a lot of the traditional structures and she used social enterprise before is even popular. She built a world class moving company where you had ex-cons moving stuff safely. She runs restaurants all sorts of businesses and has brought her target population into whole new opportunities and whole new networks. Another organization right here in San Francisco that's an amazing one of our study sites are the National Park Units this is a Presidio which was in the country's as a military base for over 200 years and then in 1992 Congress wanted to sell it and there was a huge community outcry and this forced a whole level of thinking in terms of how you could preserve a place that has so many historic and natural and cultural resources and the idea was to create a self-sustaining national park and this required a whole different level of connectivity between the government between business between the real estate industry between the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors and the results have been astounding as you can see if you look outside the windows. I'd like to distill this down to a couple of key points that we found from our research really the first one is around helping support and build connections throughout our communities. One of the great organizations that we were looking at on this is doing this extremely well is Urban Sustainability Directors Network. Their work their mission is to connect the leaders of sustainability movement across our largest cities and in North America United States and Canada primarily and they took this network building approach and they wanted to expand the impact and innovation of the cities and they consciously built ties among their members and connected them with one another and with very diverse cities with very diverse interests and over a five-year time increased the number of ties from an average of eight to almost 40 and the results have been stunning in terms of collaboration and innovation in some of the areas that most need innovation and sustainability. Another principle second principle I'd like to talk about is helping people move to action. Many people think that ideas progress linearly over time and many in our community like to think about things and they want to think about it more and they want to think about it more and what the real value in innovation it's a stepwise progression and the way that the progression the ideas progress in value is by reducing the uncertainty and really the only way to reduce that uncertainty is to do. It's a process of thinking and doing and iterating and learning from your mistakes. One of the great examples in the this area and social impact that's done this is revolution foods. This was founded by two MBAs from Berkeley that wanted to change the quality of food served in our nation's schools. They didn't know a lot about food systems or school systems but they were passionate about making an impact and they formed some very unusual partnerships with Whole Foods, with Charter Schools, with many in the community that they learned and they prototyped. They would literally buy small quantities of food from Whole Foods in the middle of the night and drive it to Charter Schools in the morning and they learned a lot in that way much more than years of business planning or years of writing would do. They learned what kids like to eat, they learned what communities need, they learned what the schools want and what it's like to partner with large corporations. Now in less than 10 years they now have over a thousand employees and are serving millions of healthy lunches across America. This probably wouldn't have been possible if they had just continued to think about it rather than take action and learn. The final big point here is around bringing in unusual partners. One of our study sites is looking at the California energy market and we often hear this rhetoric about government stifling innovation and that's not what we're finding. We're finding that government can be a huge source of innovation. This is a graph of energy usage per capita comparing the United States as a whole in California and over roughly the last 40 years the per capita energy use in California has remained constant whereas in the United States as a whole it's doubled or tripled which makes sense in some ways that it would increase. What doesn't make sense logically is it will remain the same given the proliferation of electronic devices and that's been very consciously a policy decision but also bringing in industry and environmental nonprofits to drive innovation in energy and lighting. We've particularly studied the residential lighting market. There's a lot of information on the slide and two points though to take from the slide I think are of course the declining cost curve of this technology LEDs but perhaps maybe more interesting because that's a typical cost curve decline. What's more interesting are those companies that innovated those probably not many of you have heard of those companies they're not the typical players in the lighting or energy market and that's what's interesting. This drive towards energy efficiency of high quality lighting has opened the market to a whole lot of new players that are producing high quality light that's dramatically reducing the energy and the environmental impacts and this would not have been possible by government industry or nonprofits working alone but this connectivity with some very unusual partners has had a tremendous impact in this lighting. We're going to see this for years to come here in California. In summary I just would like to come back to the key points that I think are so important for social sector leaders to focus on which is around abandoning this idea this myth of the lone innovator helping build and support communities helping people move to action and considering very unlikely partners. It's been a pleasure to speak with you all today. I would love to continue this conversation. Here's my contact information and thank you again.