Institutional Investments

A series that started with this piece: Rethinking the product of community foundations

Some of today’s most successful companies did not scale because they built better products. They scaled because they reinvented how things move through their systems. A few examples are cited so often they’re almost cliché: Amazon is a logistics company that happens to sell products. Netflix is a recommendation engine that happens to stream movies. Uber is a dispatch network that happens to move people. Airbnb is a trust platform that happens to book lodging.

The common thread is that these companies realized they had misidentified the business they were in, then redefined themselves.

Community foundations have traditionally understood themselves as organizations that mobilize and distribute resources. But what if resources are only one thing flowing through them — what if grantmaking isn’t the primary product?

For years, community foundations have asked how they can become more than grantmakers. Leadership has been viewed an additional competency. What if the better question is this: What business are we actually in?

The money, assets, people, and capacity an institution can put to work.
Examples: Denver Water, GoFundMe
What an institution chooses to notice, follow, and keep in view.
Examples: Berggruen Institute, Toniic, Kansas City Chiefs, Neon Museum, CFLeads’ Civic Health Summit, CivicLex
The facts, data, and knowledge an institution gathers and makes available.
Examples: Denver Water, Neon Museum, CivicLex
How an institution makes meaning from what it knows and observes.
Examples: How much interpretive distance do we want?, Toniic, Surfrider Foundation, Kansas City Chiefs, CFLeads’ Civic Health Summit, CivicLex
The assumptions and frameworks that shape how an institution understands the world.
Examples: Burning Man, Toniic, Surfrider Foundation, Kansas City Chiefs, Neon Museum, GoFundMe, CivicLex
The institution’s capacity to weigh competing information, values, and possibilities and decide what matters.
Examples: Toniic, Berggruen Institute, Surfrider Foundation
The confidence that allows people to rely on an institution — and institutions and people to rely on one another.
Examples: Denver Water, Burning Man, Surfrider Foundation, GoFundMe, CivicLex
The connections through which an institution knows people, builds understanding, and gets things done.
Examples: Toniic, Surfrider Foundation, Burning Man
The ability to align people, organizations, resources, and action around shared work.
Examples: Denver Water, Surfrider Foundation, Burning Man, Toniic
The institutional knowledge that preserves what has been learned, tried, decided, and experienced over time.
Examples: Surfrider Foundation, Neon Museum
The capacity to envision possibilities beyond current conditions and make new futures conceivable.
Examples: How much interpretive distance do we want?, Burning Man, Berggruen Institute, Kansas City Chiefs