2025 CDS Annual Conference

Relationship of presentation to the conference theme (227 words) 
This presentation connects with the conference themes of innovation, thriving communities, and place-based collaboration for shared regional prosperity. 
We will present the Center for Integrative Leadership’s tool to support community leaders to tackle common challenges by recombining existing resources (relationships, knowledge, money, institutions, natural and human capital, infrastructure, etc.) to craft innovative pathways through collaboration. The foundation of our approach is the belief that cross-sector collaboration is not only necessary but also a strategic pathway to innovative problem-solving and collective impact in our interdependent world. Our agenda-setting tool - known as the Minimum Viable Benefit (MVB) process - is a structure for community leaders from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors to collaborate to identify, test, and refine an initiative. The MVB is an adaptation, for the social entrepreneurship space, of the Minimum Viable Product approach commonly used in the business sector to accelerate innovation through prototyping and LEAN processes. 
We’ve been implementing this approach with teams of leaders from small towns and rural and urban regions throughout Minnesota since 2019. Our approach is very much about place-based collaboration for collective impact and creating thriving communities with an emphasis on advancing shared prosperity. Our process is also well-suited to the conference theme of people-driven solutions because the foundation of the MVB process is the the diverse experiences, identities, values and commitments, sectoral and professional backgrounds of the community leaders. 
Overall description for the conference program (100 words) 
I will present the Center for Integrative Leadership's process to support cross-sectoral initiatives for shared community prosperity. The Minimum Viable Benefit (MVB) process is an agenda-setting tool for community leaders from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors to both launch an impactful project and build their collaborative leadership capacity. IT consists of a series of questions that help communities manage the overwhelm of facing outstanding challenges or opportunities by identifying, testing, and refining interventions. The MVB process adapts business innovation prototyping approaches for the social entrepreneurship space. We will share a free, online guide and case study examples from Minnesota.