The rough idea for a practitioner network around the topic of Stakeholder Dialogues grew a long time ago. The Collective Leadership Institute´s vision is to empower as many people as possible to use Stakeholder Dialogues as a means to bring about positive change and to contribute to a sustainable world. This is why we envisioned an online platform that would make our specific knowledge and methodology accessible to everyone. So we knocked on many doors trying to raise funds for the development of this platform, and, finally, received a seed funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2012. The development phase was a very exciting time. None of us had ever done something like this before. But in April 2013, less than a year after initiating the development, we launched the website officially. I am proud that StakeholderDialogues.net turned out to be a fantastic website.

WHAT IS YOUR PERSONAL ADVICE FOR TRIGGERING INNOVATION PROCESSES?

For me, innovation starts with problem solving. It is important that a project or product is not designed as an end in itself, but it has to have an added value for the people who use it. One of the reasons for starting to think about a practitioner network in the first place was, for instance, that we received many inquiries from people involved in multi-stakeholder processes, who could not afford our training courses, but were highly interested in learning about how to better design their stakeholder processes.

Another way to get to the root of problems or finding innovative solutions is to step out of your comfort zone. Simple tools like “the five whys”, building personas or talking to your biggest critics help you to involve new perspectives on the project by walking in other people’s shoes.

INNOVATION PROCESSES DO NOT ALWAYS RUN SMOOTHLY. WHAT WERE THE CHALLENGES YOU ENCOUNTERED AND HOW DID YOU MASTER THEM?

One of the biggest challenges that we faced was to guarantee the usability of StakeholderDialogues.net. Since we had never done something similar before, we underestimated the multiple ways in which a website interface can be used and used by different people. We ended up testing the beta version of StakeholderDialogues.net with the Collective Leadership Institute’s team and our alumni, and had to adjust some pages and rearrange some features. My learning from this: Had we tested the usability at an earlier stage, it would have saved us quite some time and effort.

The project StakeholderDialogues.net was started over one and a half years ago – and what really impresses me, is how well the concept was designed. We took lots of detours, knocked-over decisions, changed strategies. But reviewing our objectives and plans from the very beginning, one realizes that now we are very close to where we had planned to be – and we learned a whole lot about website design, our target group, and ourselves along the way.

WHAT WAS NEW ABOUT THE IDEA OF STAKEHOLDERDIALOGUES.NET?

It was definitely the radical decision to make our methodology – for us, as a training institution, our key asset – accessible to everyone. On top of that we tried to design StakeholderDialogues.net in a way to make it as practical as possible. Besides the theory, with online tools, the user can apply the methodology to his/her own case in an iterative and continuous learning process. An experience that is otherwise only possible if you attend one of our training courses.

On the other hand, the new focus on building a community of actors in multi-stakeholder environments is a new step towards bringing people together and learning from each other. Through StakeholderDialogues.net we can reach out to practitioners all around the globe and exchange thoughts and ideas with them. We are thus building a global network of change makers. Our partners, like Future 500 or CSR Resources help us with that.

INNOVATION IS CONSTANTLY HAPPENNING: HOW IS STAKEHOLDERDIALOGUES.NET GOING TO EVOLVE IN THE FUTURE?