Lean Impact Quotes

“Impact is a critically important concept when it comes to social innovation, generally used in the context of measuring whether social interventions do or don’t work. But conceptually, it’s very similar to the problem of measuring success in a business before you have profits. That’s why lean methods are so perfectly suited to this kind of work. The only real difference is that instead of talking about maximizing shareholder value, Lean Impact talks about maximizing social impact. An advance party of pioneers, some of whom you’ll read about here, is already doing this, but we need more. This book is a way to help add to their numbers. Lean Impact is not only transformational for the social sector, though. My hope is that people in other kinds of businesses and organizations will also pick it up and, after reading about the dedicated people and clear strategies whose stories Ann Mei has gathered, think about how the products and institutions they build affect the world. All of us have more to learn about how we make impact so we can move together into this new era. —Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way”
― Ann Mei Chang, Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good

“One reason undesired interventions persist for longer in the social sector is because frequently it is funders rather than consumers who are paying for them.”
― Ann Mei Chang, Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good

“Perhaps one day, the same algorithms that Amazon uses to predict the next product you will want to purchase will be used to predict what intervention is most likely to transform someone’s life for the better.”
― Ann Mei Chang, Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good

“to satisfy all the crisscrossing priorities of multiple donors, organizations can end up tying themselves into a pretzel.”
― Ann Mei Chang, Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good

“The less like you your intended customers are, the more you’ll need to invest in building trust and understanding.”
― Ann Mei Chang, Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good

“Let’s be real. Innovation for social good is harder than innovation for business. Period.”
― Ann Mei Chang, Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good

“In our Berkeley class, we required each team to conduct at least ten interviews a week, to learn from real customers and stakeholders.”
― Ann Mei Chang, Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good

“To maximize our chance of success amid such complex challenges, we need a methodology to manage risk and accelerate learning.”
― Ann Mei Chang, Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good

“Innovation” may be the most overused buzzword in the world today. As the pace of change continues to accelerate and our challenges grow ever more complex, we know we need to do something different just to keep up, let alone get ahead. Finding better ways to tackle the most pressing problems facing people and the planet is no exception. Over the past few years, the notion of innovation for social good has caught on like wildfire, with the term popping up in mission statements, messaging, job descriptions, and initiatives. This quest for social innovation has led to a proliferation of contests, hackathons, and pilots that may make a big splash, but has yielded limited tangible results. So we should start by asking, What is innovation? One unfortunate consequence of the hype has been that, in common parlance, innovation has often become conflated with invention. While invention is the spark of a new idea, innovation is the process of deploying that initial breakthrough to a constructive use. Thomas Edison’s famous quote, “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration,” puts this in perspective. In other words, innovation is the long, hard slog that is required to take a promising invention (the 1%) and transform it into, in our case, meaningful social impact.”
― Ann Mei Chang, Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good