Inclusive Innovation: A Blueprint for Equity in Education

Public school districts across the country face serious challenges: how to improve literacy outcomes, develop instructional approaches that meet the needs of each student, ensure student safety, health, and well-being, engage families as partners in their children’s learning, planning for and implementing technology, amongst others. Cross cutting all is the need to make sure that solutions work for students who need them most: students living in poverty, students of color, English learners, and students with learning differences.

However, not only do education practitioners, researchers, and developers, regularly focusing on these challenges work independently, they also don’t include the perspectives of people who are disproportionately affected. What seems missing from current education R&D is a radical commitment to equity—one with no compromises, no excuses, and no exceptions.

To address the problem, Digital Promise explored six R&D models in education and other fields that have resulted in positive outcomes for underrepresented populations. Our aim was to learn from others what works and what doesn’t and develop a new prototype model for education.

A concept we found compelling is inclusive innovation, which reimagines authority, decision-making, and risk in R&D and we used this to design an overarching framework for authentically engaging underrepresented stakeholders beginning at the earliest stages. Our inclusive innovation process expands the role of underrepresented stakeholders to ensure that they are not only beneficiaries, but leaders, designers and participants.

An early example of inclusive innovation was the creation of a nationwide network of clinical trial sites for AIDS treatments in community physicians’ offices in the 1990s that ensured widespread participation by advocacy groups and AIDS patients. Results included greater focus on problems most significant to direct care of AIDS patients, faster regulatory approvals, and broader application of research results. 

The success of this increased participation resulted in the addition of PCORI (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute) into the Affordable Care Act. PCORI funds studies that help people make more informed healthcare decisions in order to make more effective use of medical resources and ultimately improve outcomes. The uniqueness of PCORI’s approach is that it involves patients and caregivers as equal partners, not just research subjects, and leverages patients’ lived experiences and expertise to ensure that research is more patient-centered, relevant, and more likely to be used by patients and the healthcare community.

A recent PCORI-funded study found that engaging parents in hospital rounds in pediatric units reduced harmful and preventable medical errors in the hospital by 38 percent. Another found that patients with less education and low incomes were able to more effectively manage chronic pain with simplified versions of cognitive behavioral therapy or pain education instead of opioids. Could this type of approach work in education?

Informed by PCORI and the other models we examined, Digital Promise developed an inclusive innovation framework for education R&D that unfolds across five stages, each with its own goals, practices, tools for data collection and analysis, protocols, and guidance on roles community members, researchers and developers might play. The framework includes practices that keep equity at the center of the process at all times.

The next step is to test this inclusive innovation model for education R&D and make improvements. One place where testing has already begun is with the EF + Math Initiative, where teams of developers, researchers and practitioners are designing new solutions for achieving better mathematics outcomes specifically by focusing on developing students’ executive function.

As Digital Promise continues to refine inclusive innovation for education R&D, I’d love to hear from readers who know of inclusive innovation practices in education or other fields. 

In the meantime, read our new report, Designing a Process for Inclusive Innovation.