- Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University - https://developingchild.harvard.edu -

Frontiers of Innovation: an Update from Corey Zimmerman, Chief Program Officer

How does one spark and facilitate innovation? That’s the question that brought me to the Center on the Developing Child eight years ago. I was excited about the prospect of joining a team who was building an initiative to accelerate the pace of innovation in the early childhood sector. Over time, this initiative—Frontiers of Innovation (FOI)—became a global movement driven by change agents who were committed to sharing their learnings, building replicable processes, and applying the science of child development to their work, all in service of improving child outcomes at a population level. Recently, we reached an inflection point in this work, with the need to ask ourselves several important questions: What has been learned from FOI? What has been achieved? What is needed next? In my role as Chief Program Officer, I am pleased to share with you some personal reflections on these questions, as well as to announce the world-wide launch of an open-access toolkit that encompasses the core ideas and tools created during FOI in a new self-serve format: the IDEAS Impact Framework toolkit.