I happen to live in the economically and socially vibrant, and bustling city of Alpharetta, Georgia. Because Alpharetta is a Technology mecca it has many Fortune 1000 company offices, as well as many entrepreneurially oriented, small and mid-sized companies.
Therefore, I regularly see many examples of innovation.
Normally, these are in the form of new products and services. However, in our innovation software and consulting companies we have found there are actually nine different types of innovation, not just new products and services. In this newsletter I would like to focus on one of the more commonly overlooked one, Societal Enrichments – which is using innovation to improve a society.
BrewAble Café Coffee Shop
BrewAble Café Board
Recently, BrewAble Cafe, a coffee shop staffed by people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD’s) opened in Alpharetta’s recreation center. The baristas do the standard things that take place in a coffee shop – grind beans, prepare drinks, offer pastries and other treats made at local bakeries, and wait on customers.
The coffee shop is a grass roots, volunteer-driven community project, which was started by a mother, Jeanette Dümmer who worried what the future held for her autistic son. She wanted her son to have a sense of belonging, feel intrinsic worth, and be able to contribute to the community.
She enlisted the help of a long-time community leader, Mary Ulich, and together they envisioned a place where people with IDD’s could find meaningful work, receive training for other jobs and integrate into the community. They wanted the public to realize that people with IDD are more like, than they are different from the average person.
BrewAble Cafe is the culmination of a two-year process that started in Envision Alpharetta, a local business incubator. The café’s location, at the Community Center is close to the city’s vibrant downtown and on the grounds of bustling Wills Park, with its walking trails, ball fields, and dog park – so it generates lots of foot traffic.
An Innovative Vision for BrewAble
The vision for BrewAble includes special needs artists showing and selling their art in the café including sketches, t-shirts, pottery, paintings, and hand-made greeting cards.
BrewAble’s overall goal is to prepare special needs people for various career opportunities and to show businesses that people with IDD make good and loyal employees. This objective includes providing a place where IID persons can learn what it’s like to be embraced by community. As a result of its initial success, the founders have developed a template for other cities or community groups to establish a similar initiative.
Using Innovation to “Do Things in a Better Way”
BrewAble Café’s initiative to create a coffee shop staffed by people with (IDD’s) fits perfectly within the broad and encompassing definition we use for innovation – which is “doing things in a better way”.
Using innovation for societal enrichments and improving humanity is altogether appropriate. For instance, the state of Connecticut justice system innovatively has prison inmates train service dogs who are provided to returning soldiers to help with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Listed below are five categories of using innovation for societal enrichments (I have chosen examples from my hometown, Atlanta, Georgia):
Individually – Just like Jeanette and Mary did with BrewAble Cafe, as individuals, using innovative thinking to 
improve society.
Community Groups – a Community organization, the Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill has established the largest community garden in US on 7.1 acres of unused inner city land. They are using innovative ways to train people how to effectively grow healthy food and turn the area from a “food desert” to a “food forest”.
Not-for-Profit Organizations – The City of Refuge in downtown Atlanta helps homeless people kick drugs, secure jobs, restore dignity, and enjoy lives of value. One of Atlanta’s most successful programs for people in crisis, it has been replicated in cities around the country. Using an innovative approach, they developed a 210,000-square-foot warehouse complex into a mini-city of opportunity, with 220 temporary residents, schools, vocational training and medical facilities. This spirit of innovation extends to providing training in automotive repair and the culinary arts, and it uses its commercial kitchen to serve 350,000 meals a year.
Government – Atlanta’s county jail innovatively provides a secure video link where family and friends of incarcerated persons can video chat with loved ones without the difficulty of having to travel to the jail facility. At a local level, the city of Alpharetta has innovatively embraced the extensive use of roundabouts (aka traffic circles) to alleviate road congestion and improve the flow of traffic.
Businesses – One of our clients, who is the largest holiday decoration and illumination operation in the southeastern United States, decorates women’s shelters free of charge. They use their unique skill set to make the lives of people in difficult situations, a little brighter (sorry about the bad pun).
Where to Start
Look around and see how you can use innovative thinking as an individual to make the world a better place. Next, consider what Community Groups or Not-for-Profit Organizations you could get involved with that would improve society.
Also, think about ways you can support and provide input to various levels of Government of how to be more innovative in enriching the lives of its constituents.
Lastly, either as the owner, leader or employee of a business, strategize how you can be a blessing to people less fortunate than yourself and then implement your innovation strategy.
If you could use assistance with using innovation to improve and enrich society, please contact us using the information below so we can be a resource to you in this sorely needed area.
Fountainhead Consulting Group, Inc. is an Innovation and Business Planning firm. During the past 17, years we have shown over 1,200 companies how to achieve their goals by using our unique, comprehensive, and systematic FastTrak Innovation Program™, Innovation Academy™, and Structure of Success™ methodologies. Using the components in these methodologies, each month we examine an aspect of how to transform your business or organization into a true 21st Century enterprise.
Office: (770) 642-4220
www.FountainheadConsultingGroup.com
George.Horrigan@FountainheadConsultingGroup.com
Tags: entrepreneur, front end of innovation, innovation, invention, small business consulting, small business planning, start a business
