Open Source Innovation Platforms

I spend my days with people who aren’t just “using AI.” They are reshaping our world by using these tools to solve pressing local challenges and imagining new ways of expressing dignity and agency. When I’m in classrooms, clinics, community centers, and research spaces, I see the early architecture of a future where technology strengthens the systems we rely on and opens universal opportunity.  They name a simple truth: our digital future will be shaped by people who carry responsibility for their communities, not by technologists alone. A few months ago, I opened this feed to my colleagues through the #PJMFLinkedInTakeover. That experiment reminded me that leadership grows when we make room for many voices. This month, I want to extend that spirit outward and highlight partners whose lived experience and judgment guide how AI and data show up in civic life. So this week, I’m launching #InnovationInPractice. Each day, you’ll hear directly from leaders in our community: • A youth organizer building AI literacy with women and older adults in Nigeria. • A paramedic designing digital tools that help communities respond to emergencies. • A climate advocate using data and AI to turn local policy into climate action. • An education leader in Brazil equipping teachers to reach every student. • An Indigenous researcher advancing data sovereignty as a pathway to justice. I hope you will spend time with these stories, share them, and add your own reflections in the comments. The future of AI will not be decided only in labs, boardrooms, or parliaments. It will be shaped by leaders like the ones you’ll meet here, in communities around the world, who are building a more just digital future in real time. Stay tuned for the first story in the series. #InnovationInPractice #AI #TechForGood #AIForPublicPurpose #Leadership #Philanthropy

In many nonprofits, innovation often mirrors privilege. Who gets to dream up solutions? Whose ideas are embraced as “bold” or “innovative”? Too often, decision-making is concentrated in leadership or external consultants, leaving grassroots, community-driven insights underutilized. This perpetuates inequity and stifles transformative potential within our own organizations. Here’s the truth: Privilege shapes perceptions of innovation: Ideas from leadership or external experts are often prioritized, while community-driven ideas are dismissed as “too risky” or “impractical.” Communities with lived experience are sidelined: Those who deeply understand systemic challenges are excluded from shaping the solutions meant to address them. The result? Nonprofits risk replicating the same inequities they aim to dismantle by ignoring the imaginative potential of those closest to the issues. When imagination is confined to decision-makers in positions of power, we limit our ability to create truly transformative solutions. As nonprofit practitioners, we can start shifting this dynamic by fostering equity within our organizations: * Redistribute decision-making power: Engage community members and frontline staff in brainstorming and strategic discussions. Elevate their voices in decision-making processes. * Value lived experience as expertise: Treat the insights of those who experience systemic challenges as central to innovation, not secondary. * Create space for experimentation: Advocate for internal processes that allow for piloting bold, community-driven ideas, even if they challenge traditional approaches. * Focus on capacity-mobilisation: Invest in staff and community partners through training, mentorship, and resources that empower them to lead imaginative projects. * Rethink impact metrics: Develop evaluation systems that prioritize community-defined success over traditional donor-centric metrics. What practices has your organization used to centre community-driven ideas? Share your insights—I’d love to learn from you! Want to hear more: https://lnkd.in/gXp76ssF

Bad ideas don’t kill innovation. Rigid cultures do. Someone proposed a small fix in a routine process. It cut errors, made work smoother, reduced stress. The team adopted it. It worked. But because it didn’t come from the “right level,” it was brushed aside. The change stayed. The credit didn’t. And the person behind it never spoke up again. Not because the idea was wrong, but because the culture wasn’t ready. Change isn’t about more ideas, it’s about reshaping culture itself. So what does that look like in practice? 1️⃣ Reward questions, not just solutions Innovation doesn’t begin with a polished pitch. It begins when someone dares to ask: “Why are we still doing it this way?” 2️⃣ Make failure boring If every test must succeed, no one will try. Normalize small, fast, safe failures , momentum builds without blame. 3️⃣ Remove the need for permission Good ideas die when they need five layers of sign-off. Trust creates velocity. Embedding these into an existing culture is never easy. One way forward is to create safe spaces where people can test, learn, and adapt without red tape. That’s exactly what Design4Impact (D4I) set out to do, not just talk about culture, but build it in practice. D4I launched in 2020, in the middle of COVID-19 to bring health, social, and design for good together. And it grew into a national platform that empowered communities with tools and trust to co-create solutions. In 5 years, D4I: 🔸 Trained 500+ participants in design thinking 🔸 Ran 3 national design challenges 🔸 Launched 9 pilots, from tackling mental health to helping caregivers feel less alone I was blessed to serve on the organizing committee, and to witness firsthand how trust, not hierarchy, unlocked real innovation. The collective wisdom has now been distilled into the D4I Playbook. It isn’t just a handbook. It’s an invitation, to rethink how we innovate, and to design with communities, not for them. 👉 Access it here: https://lnkd.in/ghJ3S6ex Culture isn’t shaped in glossy labs or polished decks. It’s shaped in the messy middle, late nights, side conversations, the meetings no one wants to attend. Every unspoken idea is a missed opportunity, to make things better, faster, or more human. If you’re in a leadership role: Who’s the quiet innovator on your team you need to hear from today? 💡This post is part of 'Rethinking Digital Health Innovation' (RDHI), empowering professionals to transform digital health beyond IT and AI myths. 💡The ongoing series and additional resources are available at www•enabler•xyz 💡Repost if this message resonates with you!

The 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐑𝐨𝐨𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 (𝐏𝐑𝐨𝐅) teaching case shows how a large healthcare consortium and a small group of manufacturers collaborated to rethink innovation in a highly regulated sector. At its core, the case demonstrates how PRoF turned the interaction between two very different communities into its main innovation engine. The large consortium represents the healthcare user community: nurses, doctors, caregivers, patients, and hospital managers who express the lived reality of care. Their contribution is experiential and value-based. Through structured “brainwave sessions,” they surface latent needs and convert them into broad keywords such as comfort, privacy, dignity, or anti-loneliness. These keywords form a shared language that avoids technical jargon and allows hundreds of users with diverse perspectives to converge around common priorities. The small consortium consists of manufacturers, architects, and designers who have the capabilities to transform these user insights into concrete room concepts. Their commercial goals are kept strictly outside the creative process, allowing trust to grow between the groups. Once the user community defines the keywords, the producer community develops prototypes, after which the large consortium returns to evaluate and refine them. This modular sequencing keeps tensions low, ensures rapid progress, and prevents commercial logic from dominating user needs. The interaction between these two communities solves a longstanding problem in healthcare innovation: suppliers often misunderstand user needs, while users lack the means to innovate. PRoF bridges this gap by letting users drive ideation and letting producers translate that insight into solutions. What emerges is a genuinely user-oriented innovation ecosystem in which neither community could succeed alone, but together they generate concepts that reshape expectations of care design. You can find the case study at HBSP: https://lnkd.in/e6nxTFM7 #UserCentricInnovation #Collaboration #OpenInnovation #CrossCommunityCollaboration #HealthcareEcosystems #CoCreation #Ideation

An ecosystem is more than just integrations! Plugging into APIs and calling it a day is NOT partnerships. Often integrations are table stakes to opening a door towards a partnership, in order to drive growth and win-win's for all participants. If not, they’re just a marketing collaboration which will only go so far. Or worse, something that keeps your team busy without delivering real impact. Partner managers inevitably get fired or leave frustrated sooner or later. This is what happens in most companies: ➡ They integrate where engineering capacity allows without a clear strategy. ➡ They measure success by connection count, or number of partners and not by real business impact. ➡ Their partnerships aren’t aligned with the company’s big-picture goals, and this isn't communicated effectively enough. So what should your team be doing instead? ✅ Assess where ecosystem plays make sense. Not every integration is valuable. Focus on ones that enhance your core offering, outside of your product roadmap, improve customer experience, or create new revenue streams. ✅ Prioritise partners that create network effects, not just one-off connections. The best partnerships amplify your business by driving more adoption, expanding reach, or unlocking new markets. ✅ Structure partnerships for repeatable success. Build systems. An effective ecosystem isn’t built on one-time deals, it’s designed for scalability and long-term value on both sides Aimless integrations are just an expense. Light integrations too often frustrate customers rather than add value. A true ecosystem attracts the right partners, the right users, and creates real business impact along the entire customer journey. If your company needs help building a real ecosystem, we at Hockey Stick Advisory can help. #partnership #ecosystem #growth

From my new Harvard Business Review article, here’s how to create the last of four pillars that innovative organizations need – Innovation Communities: Innovations often happen at intersections, yet many companies lack ways for innovators to connect informally and see where conversations go. This can also make innovation a lonely endeavor. It doesn’t cost much or take a lot of time to provide people with common innovation interests a means to connect and exchange ideas. At the very least, it’ll help keep them motivated. At best, it may trigger new kinds of cross-disciplinary collaborations that open up previously unseen vectors for change. Don’t be Atari, which was abandoned in frustration by an ambitious innovator: Steve Jobs.   What to do instead? Cultivate community. Take the German life sciences company, Bayer. Bayer has created an internal community of 700 innovators around the world who use common resources, join competitions against one another, and nominate local representatives to participate in an annual meeting. These connections then enable discussions about ways to cross-apply methods, business models, and other capabilities that can translate across business units. For instance, the program helped create agricultural finance options that are now offered around the world, stemming in part from an idea that originated in Bayer’s corporate finance and marketing departments in Greece. (How have you built innovation communities? Please share your approaches in the comments!)

Easy-to-understand breakdown of the modern DevOps tool ecosystem—explaining how each category of tools supports the journey from code to production. From the scripts that stitch processes together, to CI/CD systems that automate delivery, to build tools, source control, deployment frameworks, containers, monitoring platforms, automated testing, and static analysis—this guide clarifies what each tool does, why it matters, and how they all work together to create a high-performing engineering pipeline. You’ll also gain insight into choosing the right tools for your stack, understanding overlaps between platforms, and designing a DevOps workflow that improves speed, reliability, and developer productivity. With clear explanations and practical guidance, this article is perfect for engineers, DevOps leads, architects, and tech founders looking to build a scalable, modern, production-ready environment. #DevOps #SRE #CloudComputing #CICD #InfrastructureAsCode #Kubernetes #Automation #SoftwareEngineering #CloudNative #TechLeadership #EngineeringExcellence #Azure #AWS #GCP #DevOpsTools #PlatformEngineering #darshanamanikkuwadura Darshana Manikkuwadura (Dash)

“𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴” 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗯𝘂𝘇𝘇𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱. But often it causes more harm than good: We hear the word scaling everywhere in the field of social innovation. But: 𝗪𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴? And: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁? Dominant models of scaling prioritize: • Metrics over meaning • Speed over stewardship • Reach over relationships They are rooted in 𝗦𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗼𝗻 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝘆 𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰. And, 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁𝘀. Therefore they treat social change like a tech product. That kind of scaling often does harm: • It erases context. • It sidelines local wisdom. • It centers Global North norms. So… What does 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆-𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 look like? We talked to local innovators across five countries, who are re-imagining scaling. Not as replication. But as 𝘀𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗶𝗴𝗻𝘁𝘆, 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆, and 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳-𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. 🌀 𝗜𝗻 𝗚𝘂𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗮, scaling honors 𝘉𝘶𝘦𝘯 𝘝𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘳 — a Mayan worldview of harmony with nature and collective resilience. 🌱 𝗜𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗮, innovators lean into 𝘨𝘰𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘰𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘨 — mutual aid and interdependence rooted in cultural values. 💪🏽 𝗜𝗻 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗻, scaling flows through 𝘕𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘰𝘳 — community fellowship, where trust is the true measure of success. 🐝 𝗜𝗻 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗹, the Meli Bees Network spreads not products, but ancestral knowledge, ecological stewardship, and collective care. 📣 𝗜𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀, “scaling” doesn’t even translate neatly. Instead innovators use words that hold nuance, such as: 𝘗𝘢𝘨𝘱𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘭𝘰𝘺 (sustaining) or 𝘗𝘢𝘨𝘺𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘯𝘨 (growing). Across all five places: 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮 𝗞𝗣𝗜. It’s an 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁, 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀. One that honors: - Autonomy - Cultural identity - Community wellbeing. This report is a call to: - Amplify locally-led change. - Transform systems of coloniality. - Re-imagine innovation in service of life. Gratitude to the 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆-𝗟𝗲𝗱 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 (𝗖𝗟𝗜𝗣) for trusting us at Indigenous & Modern to co-create the report. And to the incredible partners who made it real. Special thanks to Joshua Konkankoh & Isabel Gennaro from the I&M team. 📖 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 👉 https://lnkd.in/e-cCMxZ8 ✅ 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲? -> Connect with me, re-share with your network & join my newsletter

We often say '𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐎𝐩𝐬' like it is a single thing. But if you have ever built or scaled a real software system, you know the truth: DevOps is an ecosystem. A full-on atmosphere. And every part plays a role in keeping the system breathing. I was going through this visual the other day and it nails something most people overlook: -> DevOps is not just about pipelines or automation. -> It is about how everything talks to everything else. -> From planning to deployment. -> From monitoring to feedback. Let’s break it down. At the centre is Collaboration This is not a soft word. It is the engine. Developers, ops engineers, QA, security, product they all have to share ownership. Not just of code, but of quality, uptime, and delivery. Surrounding that are the core stages: 𝟏. 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧 This is where it starts. Tools like Jira, Trello, or Azure Boards. But more than tools, this is about setting clarity. What are we building and why? 𝟐. 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩 Here, code gets written. VS Code, IntelliJ, GitHub. Dev environments matter. But so does code quality. This is where peer reviews and branch strategies shape long-term velocity. 𝟑. 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐬𝐭 CI kicks in. Build pipelines validate every change. Unit tests, integration tests, static analysis all this is where you stop problems early. Fast feedback loops are gold here. 𝟒. 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐃𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐲 Now you are into CD. Staging environments. Rollout strategies. Manual approvals if needed. This is where confidence matters more than speed. 𝟓. 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐫 Once it is live, your job is not done. You watch it. Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana or whatever your stack, visibility is non-negotiable. This is where ops earns its name. 𝟔. 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 And then all loops back. From logs, metrics, user feedback, postmortems. The system learns. The team improves. DevOps is not a job title or a toolchain. It is this atmosphere. A culture of shared ownership, fast iteration, and tight feedback loops. If you get it right, your product feels alive. If you do not, you are flying blind. -> So here is a question for you: Which part of this DevOps atmosphere is your team strongest in? And which part still feels like a bottleneck? Drop it in the comments. Let’s compare notes.