Why Collaborators With Big Ideas Should Start Small

To solve complex societal problems, people and organizations often need to come together. But cross-sector collaboration is not always easy—even when everyone shares the same motivation.

Research from the University of Minnesota presents a strategy for helping collaborators achieve their goals by narrowing their focus into small, tangible steps. Published last year in Stanford Social Innovation Review, this procedure, called the “minimum viable benefit (MVB) process,” is already being used in classrooms and professional settings.

Professor Myles Shaver, the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Corporate Strategy in the Carlson School’s Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship Department, researched and developed the MVB process with two cross-sector collaborators: Associate Professor Kathy Quick, from the UMN Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and Senior Fellow Vanessa Laird, from both the Humphrey School and the UMN Law School. All three have taught through the University’s Center for Integrative Leadership, and that work, including teaching an Integrative Leadership Seminar, informed their research on cross-sector collaboration.

“The research is very much driven from our teaching experiences,” says Shaver, who is also the Carlson School’s associate dean of faculty and research.

The MVB process guides collaborators through a series of questions to help them narrow their focus based on needs and resources, and then create a one-year plan for a project that is within their capacity. After the project is complete, the MVB process guides collaborators through evaluating whether to scale up, pivot, or stop their project in order to meet their larger goals of positive societal change.

“The notion is to start small with the idea of ending big,” Shaver says. “If you start too big, you never get traction. We’ve seen that cross-sectoral projects often fail when people get stuck in the overwhelm. People are motivated by big problems, but then often spiral out or run out of energy.”

This bite-sized approach to problem-solving serves as the basis of the curriculum for students in the Integrative Leadership Seminar and the Center for Integrative Leadership’s Minnesota Young American Leaders Program (MYALP). Through MYALP, leaders from across Minnesota work on real-world projects and learn how to collaborate across the for-profit, government, and non-profit sectors for the good of their communities.

“With the participants of MYALP in particular, being from all across the state, they really see the impact of the expertise and research from the University of Minnesota, how it affects them as individuals and how it affects their communities,” Shaver says.

Julie Ruzek, executive director of Cradle 2 Career MN, participated in the 2023 MYALP cohort, in the Rochester group. That project involved developing a space for cross-sector collaboration, where leaders in the community could come together and utilize the collective knowledge of the group to problem-solve. Additionally, Ruzek has brought the MVB process to her own work at Cradle 2 Career MN.

“I am a dyed-in-the-wool believer in the MVB process,” Ruzek says. “Starting small, evaluating progress, pivoting when necessary, and scaling have been incredibly beneficial to the work my team and I do each day.”

As this research is taught at the Center of Integrative Leadership, it will continue to benefit University of Minnesota students as well as MYALP participants from across Minnesota. And the researchers have even heard feedback from people globally, following the publication of their paper.

“I’m really proud of it,” Shaver says. “It’s this tie between scholarship and teaching and community outreach in Minnesota that has led to this. And our insights are now being much more widely adopted as well.”