Why Organizations Must Innovate

In recent times I have been in a position to ask various groups of Jewish educators and communal professionals to come up with new ideas – specifically innovative ways to engage Jewish teens in meaningful Jewish activities. Perhaps not surprisingly, brainstorming alone did not deliver any out-of-the-box ideas. In the vast majority of instances people are only able to conjure events from their own experiences – ideas may be tweaked or adapted – but at the end of a day very rarely does something qualitatively different emerge from these group think sessions.

So what do these experiences tell me? If I were to believe much of the general discourse in the Jewish community it might lead me to conclude that not everyone (or maybe specifically not Jewish educators and communal professionals) can be innovative. Only those who are young upstarts can be innovative, and traditional institutions have little or no capacity to innovate. Yet the reality on the ground tells me something very different.

In this current economic climate one of the more common sound bytes is that now more than ever is the time to be creative and to innovate. The assumption being, that those who are creative will succeed and those who are not will fall by the wayside. One of the more troubling parts of this discourse has been the scarce attention paid to what it really takes to be creative. In understanding better what creativity and innovation really are, we can better grasp not only who can be innovative, but who has the capacity to become creative.

Continue reading at eJewishPhilanthropy, op-ed by David Bryfman.