Several of this year’s Innovation in American Government winners show clear nonprofit roots.  We’re not surprised in the slightest. 

In surveying the landscape of online philanthropy, Guidestar founder Buzz Schmidt calls for a new and different dynamic that would bring about a “high-functioning philanthropy system.”

If you built a network of entrepreneurs scattered across the country, would they use it?

A new Atlanta-based nonprofit with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, inBloom aims to make education technology more accessible.

With a five-year, $150 million pledge from the Kresge Foundation to support the Detroit Future City plan, other struggling U.S. municipalities will likely be looking closely at Detroit.

Encore.org has announced the winners of the 2012 Purpose Prize awards, which come with $100,000 grants to social innovators who are over the age of 60.

Google’s new Global Impact Awards honor and provide sizable grants to nonprofits that are making innovative use of technology in tackling difficult problems.

Foreign Policy’s list of the top 100 “global thinkers” includes plenty of our heroes and heroines.

Many philanthropic advisors are working with donors to do creative things with their money, but it is rare that the charitable and philanthropic sector finds out what is or is not working.

To the editors of The Economist, the story of TED has lessons for the business world. We see some challenges for nonprofit management, too.

At a recent conference of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, the call of the day was for innovation, adaptation, collaboration and teaching across sectors.

Nonprofits in the healthcare field that are dedicated to combating and raising awareness of diseases are applying tactics from humor to education regarding health concerns. Does it work?

While many who dub themselves social entrepreneurs are, in their own eyes, outsider hero types, there are many working to make equally big changes in existing institutions.

Chicago Ideas Week Executive Director Jessica Melkin says that the event, which just wrapped up its second year, is like “Davos for the Everyman…It’s inclusive.”

There was no reason for last week’s White House conference on innovation to be closed to the press, and there’s no reason for philanthropy to be complicit in diminishing transparency.

VOICES FROM THE FIELD

Is the notion of so-called “strategic philanthropy,” in all of its beguiling forms, a very powerful accomplice in transforming the funding ecology and structure of the nonprofit sector?

A Boston-based nonprofit that helps keep people in their homes via an innovative repurchase program is now being considered in Western Massachusetts.

When implemented wisely, social innovation is a positive approach to nonprofit growth; but most current practice falling under that rubric tends to invest primarily in one organization or program. Wouldn’t investment in infrastructure be far more valuable to development of the sector overall?

A disrupted environment like the one we live in calls for constant innovation, but how do such advances happen? This small article from Joichi Ito in the New York Times is food for thought.

Nonprofits are using information and communications technologies to support their missions in innovative ways. Many of these organizations are achieving great results with limited amounts of money and technical expertise.