The Frontiers of Innovation (FOI) initiative is building an expanding and diverse community of policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and philanthropists and is designed to catalyze cross-sector, cross-disciplinary collaboration and high-impact strategies for innovation in the field of early childhood policy and practice. Launched in May 2011, FOI draws on the expertise of the Early Childhood Innovation Partnership (ECIP), a collaborative effort of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, and the TruePoint Center for High Performance and High Commitment.

Science tells us that early childhood is a time of both great promise and considerable risk, and its influence can extend over a lifetime. The mission of the FOI initiative is to produce transformational thinking about how to enhance human potential by supporting the healthy development of young children, with a particular focus on disadvantaged children and families. The work of the FOI initiative is centered on two core priorities: (1) forging cross-sector connections that foster new, innovative interventions and fresh thinking to significantly increase the impact of current early childhood programming and (2) accelerating innovation through a small portfolio of committed “Idea Groups” working in partnership with a cluster of community-based demonstration sites and state policy collaborations to develop, implement, and test new intervention models and innovative policy ideas. The FOI web site, which is being used to facilitate communication among FOI members, but will be transitioned to a public platform for broader engagement at a future date, fosters collaboration and innovation among the community by providing an ongoing platform to connect members across professional and geographical boundaries.

The FOI initiative’s aim is to combine scientific insights, practical experience, and creative risk-taking to generate new policies and practices that are:

1. grounded in a unified evidence base derived from well-established scientific principles that can be applied across agencies and sectors;
2. likely to produce greater impacts than current programs for disadvantaged young children and their parents; 
3. positioned to mobilize both public and private sector resources; and 
4. designed to be feasible and replicable (with adaptations as needed) in a broad array of political, economic, social, and cultural contexts.  

The current theory of change driving the FOI initiative is that the interrelated neurobiology of emotional and cognitive development provides a scientific basis for augmenting the positive impacts of early learning programs with a) interventions that promote the development of executive functioning skills (such as behavior regulation and working memory) and b) more effective prevention and early treatment of mental health concerns and behavior problems in young children.

In addition, the FOI community is primed to leverage an integrated science of early development to help improve the policy climate in support of innovation in this area. To this end, the collective expertise of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child and the National Forum on Early Childhood Policy and Programs will be mobilized to help inform creative, new, evidence-based intervention strategies as well as to provide input on promising outcomes that can serve as short- and medium-term markers of program effectiveness. A Project Launch Committee, which consisted of eight individuals from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, was recruited to provide strategic guidance for the launch phase of FOI.

Three major work streams of the FOI Community

Idea Groups

“Idea Groups” are small working groups charged with transforming innovative thinking into actionable plans. These groups are designed to address the following tasks: (1) stimulate new thinking and distill promising strategies into testable interventions; (2) collaborate with leading-edge states to design, implement, and evaluate science-based policy changes; and (3) identify promising candidates for collaborative, community-based demonstration sites. Some Idea Groups receive active support from the Center and others operate independently, utilizing the connections and infrastructure of the FOI initiative.

The Building Caregiver Capacities (BCC) group formed as the first Idea Group to develop a new framework for thinking about early childhood practice and to translate that framework into innovative intervention strategies and policy recommendations. The group’s work is grounded in a strong scientific background supporting the idea that young children can be buffered against the harmful effects of persistent stress by building caregiver-child relationships, strengthening the cognitive, self-regulatory, and decision-making skills of adult caregivers, and increasing the regularity, predictability, and organization of children’s daily environments. These skills can then be passed on to children, promoting their effective learning and development, while at the same time making adult caregivers more employable workers who are better equipped to manage the stresses of their daily lives and effectively plan for their futures.

The BCC meets regularly over videoconference to present ideas and critique one another’s work, with in-person meetings scheduled to accomplish specific goals in short time spans. Its members include Beth Babcock (Crittenton Women’s Union), Silvia Bunge (UC Berkeley), Phil Fisher (University of Oregon), Annmarie Hulette (UC San Francisco), Bette Hyde (Washington State Department of Early Learning), Alicia Lieberman (UC San Francisco), Linda Mayes (Yale University), Jamie Radner (University of Toronto), Jack Shonkoff (Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University) and Megan Smith (Yale University). The blend of backgrounds and experience within the group allows them to draw on knowledge from a broad range of neuroscience, mental health, medical, education, economic, and public policy perspectives to both guide the design of innovative interventions and measure their impacts.

Since its inception, the group has been working to identify what makes certain parent-focused interventions successful (the so-called “active ingredients”), with a particular interest in testing novel combinations of these successful intervention elements to produce landmark gains for children and families. With the announcement of a partnership between the Frontiers of Innovation community and Washington State, their work has begun to accelerate in two distinct but complementary dimensions – both co-creating interventions with early childhood sites in Washington and translating the science behind their approach to inform a broad audience within the state. To accelerate the co-creation of interventions, the Department of Early Learning has helped to introduce the BCC group to a small group of sites who are ready to begin experimenting with novel capacity-building program ideas. These sites have been presented with a “menu” of program elements to choose from, with the option to mix and match elements that they believe will best fit their infrastructure and benefit the families they serve.

Other Idea Groups are forming around additional topic areas to build knowledge and provide expertise to the FOI community and the early childhood field at large, including a focus on early identification of risk factors and building family and community resources.

Innovation by Design States

Innovation by Design (IBD) state policy collaborations aim for population-level, systemic changes that benefit young children using strategies intended to reduce barriers to learning and improve life-long health outcomes. In addition to developing innovative policy and practice, each state participates in a FOI state subgroup. This state policy focused community will offer an opportunity for structured collaboration across states where information is shared in a safe environment, problems are solved, and new ideas are nurtured. To promote innovation and collaboration, successful IBD states will have these core elements:

• Breakthrough goals for improved outcomes for vulnerable children;
• Commitment from key members of state leadership;
• An explicit impact strategy and innovation agenda; and
• A willingness to share openly and honestly within the IBD state community.

The state of Washington has emerged as the first IBD state in the FOI community. The goal of the Washington-FOI collaboration is to improve learning and health outcomes for vulnerable children, in part by building executive function and self-regulation skills in children, as a result of efforts to strengthen those capacities in the parents and service providers who care for them.

Additional states interested in childhood policy and with the capacity to engage in innovative policy change are encouraged to participate in the FOI community.

 

Innovation by Design Sites

The Innovation by Design (IBD) site work stream seeks to form a consortium of community-based sites that are both motivated and prepared to engage in an interactive process of designing and piloting creative, new intervention strategies and contributing to active, cross-site learning. The goals of the IBD sites initiative are threefold. First, it is intended to increase practitioner representation in the FOI community. Second, the initiative seeks to build a “community of practice” where virtual networking and shared learning among practitioners will take place through teleconferences, webinars, and other communication tools. Finally, the initiative plans to identify a subgroup of sites from the consortium that will act as “incubation labs,” collaborating with Idea Groups and FOI community members to design and pilot new strategies and improve them through fast-cycle active testing and collaborative learning.

The IBD sites, states and Idea Groups will create a collaborative network with all members in the FOI community to cross-fertilize their ongoing initiatives to achieve greater impact for the early childhood field. Central to the success of this work will be the extent to which the initiative integrates expertise from a variety of sources and is guided by evidence-based theories of change. With the active engagement of scientists and scholars, policymakers and analysts, service providers, entrepreneurs from the private and nonprofit sectors, and creative thinkers from outside the early childhood field, the FOI initiative is primed to build on current best practices and harness innovation to achieve substantially greater impacts for children.

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