Inclusive Innovation Process

We adhere to a radical commitment to equity – a statement that challenges us, along with systems leaders, educators, researchers, and developers, to do whatever it takes to ensure all students are seen, heard, and valued as powerful learners.

Inclusive Innovation is an equity-centered R&D model that seeks to affect change by supporting communities and schools in co-designing solutions that embody novel and differentiated approaches. Inclusive Innovation starts by intentionally creating and catalyzing opportunities for communities—including students, parents, families, organizers—to be at the education R&D table with district leaders, educators, researchers, and developers.

Not only are communities at the table, they are engaging as:

Schools and communities are leading. Digital Promise is facilitating, supporting, and resourcing their work in collaboration with researchers and developers.

The process of Inclusive Innovation moves iteratively through five intersecting stages:

Digital Promise: Inclusive Innovation Model

• Connect and Commit: Collaborating with communities intentionally to build relationships, trust, and a shared commitment to tackling a community-identified challenge
• Inquire and Investigate: Partnering with communities to deeply investigate the challenge from multiple perspectives and define target outcomes that are meaningful and impactful
• Design and Develop: Connecting communities with mission-aligned social entrepreneurs to facilitate the co-design of prototype solutions that can be tested against the targeted outcomes
• Implement and Iterate: Supporting and resourcing communities and entrepreneurs by testing and evaluating the solutions
• Sustain and Scale: Refining and adapting solutions to multiple contexts for scaling

What distinguishes the Inclusive Innovation model from other R&D models is that it results in solutions that have been informed and developed by co-experts, including community stakeholders, developers, and researchers. Co-designing solutions ensures they are contextually and culturally relevant. Additionally, Inclusive Innovation solutions are designed for eventual scale. The five stages provide a roadmap for mutual partnership, embedding an awareness of community context so that solutions produced through this process are effective and can be implemented in similar contexts.