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By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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GRAND RAPIDS — Chalk up another honor for West Michigan as the region positions itself as an innovative and sustainable community.

In April, Grand Rapids Community College accepted a silver Edison Award for living, working and learning environments for the Keller Futures Center process for community-based innovation rooted in sustainability.

The Keller Futures Center focuses on empowering people in the community to take action on ideas that will prepare the region for the future, whether around business, government, education or any range of issues. It tackles complex problems in a structured manner that makes them easier to digest and understand so that people can get down to the business of innovating, rather than get lost in the problems. The team engages with local experts and interested parties in the community and develops ideas that anyone is free to use and expand upon.

In essence, the center puts the power to change communities at the citizens’ fingertips.

Thus far, the center has delved into urban agriculture and is in the process of investigating career services.

The Keller Futures Center team includes Liz McCormick, GRCC director of innovation; Moss Ingram, GRCC director of sustainability and associate director of innovation; Mark Champion, GRCC innovation analyst and resident futurist; and Bill Fluharty, a design and innovation consultant and former VP of research and discovery at Johnson Controls Inc. The group recently sat down with MiBiz for an exclusive interview.

The Keller Futures Center stemmed from a 2004 gift from Fred Keller, CEO and founder of Cascade Engineering, who told the college that he’d like to see it used to create a place for anyone in the community to work on challenges, ideas or questions that impact the community.

Working from that “white canvas” and drawing from existing methodologies like design thinking, the center developed an open-sourced process that it uses to investigate these questions. The process of investigation and uncovering ideas then leads to the creation of innovative opportunities. Everyone — in this region and beyond — has free access to apply those innovations.

What’s unique about the work the center does isn’t so much those final outcomes or opportunities, but rather the process it uses to get there. The process allows the community to wrestle with a problem and come up with innovative, fundamental changes in a relatively short period of time — 42 hours spread over 7 weeks.

Fluharty said the Keller Futures Center doesn’t want to compete with other organizations focused on design thinking and innovation in business, and its acute focus on community-driven change sets it apart from other groups.

“Our intent is not to compete, but create more collaboration and maybe turbo-charge areas that need more (help) to engage more effectively,” Fluharty said. “We’re not territorial. We’re queuing up big-picture ideas.”

“With our tools, there’s nothing proprietary. Our secret sauce is in the application,” McCormick said. “We need other people to learn about (our work) and want to engage about it.”

The center serves as equal parts researcher, educator and networking facilitator. Its staff vets the topics and then creates a team of community members to investigate them further. It solicits regional participants from existing contacts, through social media, and from anyone off the street who has an interest, and all members of the team are on equal footing. The group goes through a hands-on, experiential learning process to visualize the issue at hand and wholly understand it. Working in the background is a group of futurists who add a global context to their findings.

“If we plan or create things for the future without taking the future into account, then we really just are assuming that tomorrow is like today. It’s just not true,” Champion said. “The futures research we have infused into the process ensures we don’t make that mistake. It tells us these are the changes that we know about and that might happen so we can take it into account and adapt to it.”

Only after that learning process does the group even start to discuss solutions, which can be frustrating for team members who think they know the answers at the front of the process. The deliverables from completed projects are those innovative, actionable and sustainable ideas that will help the region build its preferred future.

“We don’t get to solutions until we’ve done this homework. Imagine this as a research phase. It’s the kind of phase that people ignore. But we do this homework in areas the region is struggling with, and (in which) no one else does the homework. The ideas we present are based on real research, and it’s OK if people pick it up and start to execute. We’ve done the homework for them,” Fluharty said. “We’re very concerned that what we produce is actionable — that projects are solving a problem, and that the outcome is actionable ideas. The process gives participants a new tool for executing innovation projects, a new innovation methodology that could be new or overlaid on an existing system.”

Armed with that information, GRCC and other colleges and universities can then identify how to adapt or change curriculum to prepare the workforce to meet the region’s needs in the future.

“Innovation is any new process, product or service that provides value, and because it provides value, it’s adopted,” Ingram said. “The value causes the adoption. It’s critical that the work we do here must be adopted in our community. We want to provide this open-sourced (method) and make it as easily accessible as possible — as inviting as possible — and support them.”

But even throughout the process, the center engages with students to give them experience in observing, understanding and reacting to trends in the future when they’re in the workplace, McCormick said.

“We’re looking at how we can teach the skills employers need in those folks,” she said. “We help them with ways to communicate a message in not just words, but graphic communication … so people come to an understanding much faster.”

In fact, graphic communication underlies much of the center’s work because it helps speed the process of understanding complex issues. Many times, a graphic depiction can be clearer than words, but it can take someone with a different mindset to think that way.

“This approach allows us a way to make big problems small so we can come up with big thinking. It’s not so hard or complex that we just spend time spinning,” McCormick said. “A skill we’ll need in the future is someone who doesn’t get paralyzed, but can ask questions even if they don’t know what they’re talking about. We want to form these new connections to drive the innovation we’re aiming for. … We want to strengthen the brand of West Michigan as forward-thinking people and be part of this whole ecosystem that’s hoping to reinvent our area.”