Case Study: Innovation Strategy

The Challenge: With more than 50 regions and nearly 10 different national teams to serve, the IT team at Teach For America had many different stakeholders to support. My role as lead business analyst for regions was to find new ways to meet the needs of our regional clients, sharing the lessons we learned and insights we gained, while defining a new strategy and vision for how IT could work better with regions.

Approach: After a year of research and prototyping different methods of running pilots, hosting trainings and workshops, and bringing together cross functional learning communities, I launched "Spark Labs" as an internal innovation incubator. I built support and resources from within IT leadership, engineering, and our regional and national partners. Our goal was to create a new paradigm of engagement that put regional stakeholder and user needs first. To drive our research, we launched a new campaign of "Design Camps" that brought human centered design workshops and skills to our regional clients.

Results: Over the course of more than two years Spark Labs ran 9 projects with more than 10 client teams working with a budget of under $200,000 per year (including staff time). The insights gained from our work led to innovations in data modeling, matching, business intelligence, mapping, talent management, reporting, and more.

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