The World Vision “Innovation Manifesto”

Virtually every organization on the planet lays claim to innovation as a critical component of its future. Everyone is talking about innovation these days.

Yet, organizations are often slow to act. That is why a useful exercise for any group wanting to embrace innovation is to prepare an Innovation Manifesto—a statement of the organizational intent to innovate. This becomes a powerful tool for planners and leaders to have in hand as the roadmap guiding the organization is devised.

But as Alfred Korzybski once observed, “the map is not the territory.” For a map to be anything more than an interesting artefact, it has to be used. The roads must be travelled, the routes outlined and pursued. The difference between an artefact and a useable tool is the honesty and integrity that goes into building the map in the first place—thus the Innovation Manifesto is only as good as the integrity contained in its statements.

So, in view of the fast changing marketplace, continuous introductions of new technologies and our Industry’s relentless growth, our organization declares that an Innovation Manifesto shall be more than a roadmap, it shall guide us as we build our ministry, fulfil our mission, and pursue our goals. Innovation shall guide our ministry, our operations and our actions.

What does our Innovation Manifesto look like?


As an Innovative Organization:

01. Leadership shall embrace, encourage and nurture innovation at all times. Every decision will take into consideration how that decision shall affect the innovativeness of the organisation.

02. Senior management shall communicate the importance of innovation and celebrate specific innovations achieved and our future innovation goals. Such communications shall be both internal and external and target employees, communities, partners, donors, stakeholders and the general public.

03. Senior leadership teams shall adopt more creative behaviour and shall ensure that each and every member of their team has time to be creative and understands that being creative – which leads to innovation – is a critical component of his/her job responsibilities; whilst also demonstrating the same to employees, clients and supporters.

04. Realizing that innovation is our future, we shall all learn to greet new and disruptive ideas with open minds supported by open resources; employees shall be rewarded for their innovative ideas – even if those ideas are not implemented or are not profitable.

05. We shall take great pride in our innovativeness and strive to improve it daily; continuous and disruptive innovation shall become business as usual for all World Vision entities; we shall also be supported by innovative management process.

As an Innovative People:

01. We won’t wait for someone to give us permission to innovate – we will push forward to try things out.
As an Innovative People:

02. We will recognize that innovations have a life-span – we will try to execute ideas that last, and that make things better.

03. We reject “Not-Invented-Here” as not consist with our culture or our mission. We will execute the best ideas we can find, regardless of where they came from.

04. We recognize that innovation is a process of flow – we generate ideas, we select ideas, and we execute ideas. Since the last two are the parts that most people aren’t good at, those are what we’ll concentrate on.

05. We will build fast prototypes, and iterate rapidly instead of trying to make things perfect from the start. We will find small, inexpensive ways to test our ideas. We will learn from the ideas that don’t work. We will scale up the ideas that do work.

06. We will embrace innovation is the best way to enact strategy – and will keep the two aligned.

07. We will recognize that innovation happens in networks – we will understand ours as well as we can, and build them to facilitate innovation.

08. We embrace the concept that innovation is not invention – we will focus on making ideas work, not just having them.

09. We affirm the principle that our strategy and our brand are built by what we do every day, not by what we say. We will use innovation to build both.

010. We will inspire others and bring them on board because innovation is a team sport.