Our Mission Is to Spread Good Ideas for Good.

This is the inspiration for the name ‘Innovira’, which is a contraction of ‘Innovating Virally’. Innovira will provide a platform for communicating and showcasing ideas, but this is not the primary mode of operation. Primarily, Innovira will be an ‘ideas incubator’ to initiate, develop, enable and support initiatives for the public benefit, and then scale and spread them through networks – usually networks or partnerships that already exist.

The hypothesis is that there are thousands of sparks of innovation and creativity to be unearthed. In communities around the world, people have solved problems and found solutions so that they could make their communities better. If we can unearth examples of good practice, and work out what is transferrable and what is scaleable, then we can enable the value of the initial spark to be multiplied many-fold.

We will work closely with existing networks and partners to reach our market. We will identify early adopters – people and organisations that are eager to adopt a new solution – to test the best way to roll-out each new initiative.

We are the ‘middle man’. There has to be an inspiration for each idea. There also has to be a market – people and organisations who will take ownership of implementing the ideas in their communities, and in their networks. Innovira will not do any direct delivery. Because we will not be building an empire, and we will not be delivering services directly, we should be able to scale ourselves in terms of being able to run multiple projects at any one time. The organisation will be designed to do this, both in terms of systems and processes, but also in terms of culture.

Each project will operate as autonomously as possible within a single governance framework, and this will create a community of change leaders. Our operating model will be designed to maximise the chance of success of this community of change leaders. Each project will have its own focus and theory of change, within the overall vision. Our shared values are sustainability, outcome-focus, openness, collaboration, and cost-effectiveness.

Each project will have its own focus and theory of change, within the overall vision. As we will mainly be working with and through intermediaries, we will need to develop interim measures around scale and quality of adoption as leading indicators of social outcomes.

We have developed a Project Intro which asks the following questions:

Spreading Good Ideas for Good (Fit to Mission)

• What is the idea?
• How will the idea be spread?
• What partners might we work with?

Thriving Communities and a Healthy Planet (Fit to Vision)

• What are the charitable objects of the project – what are we trying to change?
• Who are the end-beneficiaries of the project?
• What are the outcomes we are aiming for, and how will we evaluate impact?

Sustainability (Cost-Effectiveness)

• How will the project be funded?
• What is the long-term vision for the project?

The Project Ideas will be evaluated based on the answers to these questions.

The Founding Trustees of Innovira are Ian McKay, Jim McPhee and John Ranford.

Between them, Ian, Jim and John have over 70 years’ experience of working for, or volunteering for, charities.

Their roles have included Chair of Trustees, Treasurer, CEO, Programmes Director, Fundraiser and Strategic Consultant.