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This post from Jeffrey Cufaude is the final in the short series of posts from members of ASAE's Innovation Task Force on how association leaders need to be thinking about innovation in their organizations.

One of my takeaways from serving as a member of ASAE's Innovation Task Force for the past year is how difficult it is for many in our community to: (1) define innovation, (2) label any of their own work as innovative, and (3) appreciate the real value that incremental innovation can play in advancing mission and vision.

Peter Drucker once defined innovation as "change that creates a new dimension of performance." A lot of meaning and guidance can be unpacked from this simple definition:

• What is the new dimension of performance that our members (future members) would value? Answers for this question often start in the form of "Wouldn't it be great if you could ..."


• What change, if implemented, might make that new dimension possible? Producing enhanced value and a new dimension of performance may require approaching the work from fundamentally different premises or assumptions to unleash new possibilities in process or programming.

Disney has institutionalized the value of incremental innovation in the form of Walt Disney's plussing strategy. Walt used plus as a verb, one defined as adding more value than the customer paid for or expects: How do we plus this? Disney cast members are daily tasked with plussing all of their efforts. Over time, the aggregated value enhanced by hundreds and thousands of plussing efforts is quite significant, but generally requires little to no new resources to produce. Think about the delight a member would experience if in every interaction with your association her expectations were slightly exceeded.

Exponential innovations often can be jumpstarted by a total overhaul of an existing program or service you plan on retaining, but such efforts often are stymied because people perceive the motivation to do so as personal or political. We can counter this be ensuring that association programs that meet a certain threshold (budget, number served, etc.) routinely go through a periodic major maintenance effort. Now your efforts aren't being singled out; it's just your turn.

During these major maintenance reviews, every single aspect of the initiative comes into question including the fundamental assumptions for the effort. It's the programmatic equivalent of zero-based budgeting, professional recertification, or institutional re-accreditation. Breakthroughs in new dimensions of performance for longstanding programs often require "re-creating" from the ground up instead of merely tinkering around the edges.

Just as the 60,000-mile maintenance for your car is more comprehensive and expensive than 15,000 -mile maintenance, so might the refreshing of a 5-year program require a more significant rethinking and investment than the review of a 3-year program. But failure to do either almost certainly ensures untimely breakdowns and expensive repairs in the future. The same can be said for unexamined association initiatives.