A concept in development. Feel free to comment. Get in touch if you want to be involved: @WFLeadership or @kristinwolff.

1. A 21st Century Jobs, Innovation & Leadership Lab
“As of 2008, the war for good jobs has trumped all other leadership activities […] The
lack of good jobs will become the root cause of almost all world problems that America
and other countries will face.”
–Jim Clifton, Gallup Management Journal (September 2011)
The Problem
Jobs. There is no more significant issue on the minds of Americans today, or for the past
several years. Increasingly, jobs is every leaders’ job, across sectors, industries, geographies,
and disciplines. And leaders can come from any corner of an organization, not just the
management tier.
1. Communities face significant problems relating to jobs, work, and economic
security for which existing programs and investments provide insufficient
responses (unemployment; job/career transitions; industry shifts, etc.). Innovations in
other fields (social innovation, Gov2.0, design, gaming, etc.) could inform new solutions,
but there are few networks that connect people with problems to people with potential
solutions in strategic and actionable ways. In addition, the risks of innovating in isolation
(e.g., as a single social innovator, organization, or agency) are high and the benefits not
widely shared. The Lab will help teams connect with innovators in related fields and their
problems-solving and design methods, emphasizing rapid prototyping not just analyzing
and planning.
2. Leadership in key professional fields tasked with the jobs agenda (e.g., workforce
and related disciplines) is aging and mechanisms to prepare new leaders are
lacking. 519 workforce leaders from across disciplines and jurisdictions told us that their
field needs to pay attention to its next generation—not just by recruiting new people, but
by building new skills, sharing knowledge across generations, and developing social
networks that will enable innovation. The Enhancing Workforce Leadership Initiative
documented six practices that embody the best of workforce leadership today. These
practices will inform the design of the Lab, but we also expect the applied experience in
the lab to inform our understanding of needed skills and practices. The Lab will cultivate
next-generation leaders and build networks within and across professional fields that
share a commitment to community prosperity.
3. Budget cuts are looming. Workforce leaders will almost certainly be asked to do more
with less. They must also do different. The Lab will provide opportunities to experiment
with new tools and bold approaches at a manageable scale.

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4. Workforce is one area inside the larger field of public policy, which itself struggles
with innovation. The workforce field is characterized by an abundance of “best
practices” that seek greater efficiency or effectiveness, but a dearth of new game-
changing ideas and mechanisms to scale them. The Lab seeks to build innovation
capacity in the workforce policy field—among leaders, within organizations, and across
the networks. We know what the key problems are and are prepared to design supports
that overcome them in ways that appropriately mitigate risk.
Our Approach
We seek to pilot a Jobs, Innovation & Leadership Lab in which 8-10 teams from across the US
participate in a 12-month series of activities designed to cultivate leaders who can innovate
solutions to the jobs problem. Activities include the following:
• Immersive learning on process subjects like social innovation methods, design thinking,
rapid prototyping, documenting, etc.
• Exposure to new ideas from other fields and across the globe that might inform the
problems they seek to solve
• Peer-supported action planning and testing of models to launching and implementing
new ideas
• Documenting and disseminating processes, lessons, and results
• Building networks within and across teams, geographies, disciplines, organizations,
professional fields, and demographics groups
The Lab will be based on the WEadership Framework.1 The teams will design and launch
innovation initiatives that address job-related social and economic problems in participants’
home communities. The teams will be supported by their peers, SPR staff, and partners
throughout implementation (approximately 12 months), with SPR documenting the entire life of
the project so that ideas, lessons, and other “how-tos” can be shared widely with leaders and
aspiring leaders concerned with work, learning, and community prosperity (internationally).
Our Goals
The Lab is designed to allow cross-generational, cross-disciplinary teams to develop and launch
solutions to critical workforce challenges they have not been able to address in traditional ways.
The point of the Lab is to build the teams’ capacity to iterate, experiment, and innovate within
the networks in which they work.
1
The WEadership framework consists of six practices—1) adopting a wide-angle point of view, 2)
building diverse networks, 3) embracing openness, 4) encouraging experimentation, 5) adding unique
value, and 6) cultivating next-generation leaders—identified during the course of the Enhancing
Workforce Leadership initiative, the project that lead up to this concept. The project engaged 519 leaders
concerned with work, jobs, and community prosperity, ranging from mayors to workforce board staff to
entrepreneurs and social innovators. The entire initiative is documented on the project’s website. The
main products, including the project’s video trailer, are accessible here and a brief description and
roadmap of resources is here. You can follow the project, managed by Social Policy Research Associates
and initially sponsored by the US Department of Labor, on Facebook or Twitter (@WFLeadership).

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We aim to:
1. Cultivate a new generation of leaders who know how to innovate and how to mobilize
others to jointly advance the common good.
2. Network innovative leaders to share their progress by “working out loud.”
3. Provide new ideas and policy solutions to our most pressing social problems.
What Makes the Jobs, Innovation & Leadership Lab Unique?
What we are proposing is not a leadership training program, institute, or academy in the
traditional sense. It is a collaborative laboratory in which current and aspiring leaders learn by
doing.
The Jobs, Innovation & Leadership Lab:
● Emphasizes a team approach. It is less concerned with the individual leader, social
entrepreneur, or innovator.
● Focuses on the entire innovation lifecycle, not just ideation or launch. Because we seek
to build innovation capacity itself, problem-solving through implementation matters as
much as the innovation itself.
● Explicitly links public and private systems (workforce, education, economic development)
with social innovations, so that fantastic ideas have a better chance of achieving impact
at greater scale.
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Please provide us with your feedback:
1. What initiatives should we be looking at as examples?
2. What potential partners (funders, sponsors, networks) should we
be talking to?
3. What most excites or concerns you about this concept?
In order to contribute or be kept informed about the project, comment in slideshare or on our
Facebook page, or send email to project team leaders Kristin Wolff (kwolff@thinkers-and-
doers.com) and Vinz Koller (Vinz_Koller@spra.com) or tweet @WFLeadership at Social Policy
Research Associates. You may also ring/text 503.888.1022.
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Contributors to this concept to date:
• 519 Workforce leaders who participated in the first phase of this project. They are here.
• Kristin Wolff, SPR/t+d
• Vinz Koller, SPR
• Chandra Larsen, SPR
NOTE: We have just begun sharing this document in its rough form. We plan to add the names
of those who provide feedback on the concept to the list. If you received this and plan to
comment, but would prefer not be listed by name, just let us know at kwolff@thinkers-and-
doers.com or vinz_koller@spra.com. Kristin & Vinz