FINDING THE SWEET SPOT FOR INNOVATION WITHIN GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS
“A good tennis player can play with a broom and still win their matches,” a former tennis coach once told me.
Later I learned Roger Federer—in many minds, the most naturally gifted player of all time—spent years working with the sports equipment manufacturer Wilson to build a perfectly honed racket head for his game; designed with a “sweet spot” on the strings which made the most of his type of shots.
Since our founding nearly seven years ago, we’ve been playing with a proverbial broom, not quite knowing where we best fit within government-run education systems. We kept thinking, “Let’s just get our core approach to sparking intrinsic motivation clear, and the system around us will largely take care of itself.”
Well, it did, sort of. At times, our adaptations have confused our partners and supporters—and even ourselves. But patience from donors, partners, and the systems themselves have allowed us to clumsily but earnestly discover, rather than design upfront, our true sweet spot. We hope our experiences can prove useful to other groups working in education and other areas of international development, who are trying to find their place within government systems.
Read the full article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.