Rethinking innovation: the Dutch experience of the Combine （創新的再思考：荷蘭的融合經驗）

Women’s shelters, even the larger organizations with more financial resources, often do not have budgets nor staff to innovate our work. Continuous innovation of both our working methods, organization structures and strategic and operational partnerships is key however if we want to keep up within our ever changing contexts. Digital technology is impacting our work, policies and frameworks are shifting, social changes impact the needs of women and their children coming to our shelters. In the Netherlands, we have faced major changes in the social domain over the last decades. Those have impacted the work and position of women’s shelters. In this context, we strongly felt the need to form strategic partnerships instead of doing our work in isolation. Against this background, 4 of the larger women’s shelters (Blijf Groep, Moviera, Arosa, Perspektief) have joined forces on innovation, with the aim of improving our services and becoming more effective.
After rethinking the needs of our clients and more specifically by identifying gaps and weaknesses in our current work (who does and does not benefit? what issues don’t we adress?), we wrote a short manifestoe with 5 targets for 3 years, on the basis of which we launched several innovation projects each of us could not have launched on this scale by themselves. Inspiration, using each others knowledge and learning from each others experiences are key elements to this innovation platform, which has not been based on institutional thinking but on trust, vision and the need to reach out beyond the boundaries of our own organizations and start new (types of) partnerships. For each project, we define the organizational conditions (level of agreements/contracts, financial and/or staff investments etc.), as lean as possible.
What was the basis of this innovative platform, what other partnerships and strategic alliances are we forming on innovation? How does this work currently, what dilemma’s do we face and how do we include others, both nationally and internationally?
We would like to present our experiences, successes and pitfalls, and have a discussion with participants on: what does innovation mean in your context, how do you organize it, under what conditions innovation can be succesful, etc.