A good research project can produce a dissertation, a book, or a compelling set of ideas. But there is a harder question: What keeps the learning going after the project is finished?
For most leaders, the answer is not simply to publish more. It is to connect individual research to an organizational innovation strategy, then build a business model that gives people the time and resources to keep learning. Otherwise, even excellent work can sit on a shelf while the organization returns to business as usual.
The goal is a lasting pattern: you learn from experts and experiments, your organization turns that learning into better practices, and staff gain the education to carry those practices forward.
Key Takeaways
- Plan repeated conversations with experts and connect what you learn to organizational decisions.
- Link research to a sustainable source of support if it must continue beyond publication.
- Test promising ideas, then build the people and systems needed to sustain them.
- Invest in staff education so innovation spreads throughout the organization.
Start With an Interpersonal Research Plan
Research is not limited to books, articles, and data sets. Some of the most useful learning I have done has come through conversations with people who have already faced the problems I am trying to solve. An effective interpersonal research plan treats those relationships as a serious part of the work.
Begin by identifying both your personal learning needs and your organization’s needs for innovation. Map those needs to specific domains. You may need to understand a new approach to service delivery, a different way to develop leaders, or a better strategy for growing your organization. Then ask whether each domain calls primarily for incremental innovation, which improves what you already do, or radical innovation, which changes the underlying approach.
Once you know what you need to learn, build a plan around people and organizations:
- Identify leading experts and organizations in each domain, including both Christian and secular sources where relevant.
- Set milestones for meeting them more than once rather than relying on a single interview.
- Collect useful documents and examples that show how their ideas work in practice.
- Connect what you learn to the rest of your research and to your organization’s decisions.
That last step matters. A collection of impressive interviews is not yet a research plan. You should be able to explain how those conversations will shape your project and why they will be at least as valuable to your organization as your other research.
Turn Individual Learning Into Organizational Learning
Individual research should feed an organizational learning and innovation strategy. That strategy should then lead to investment in staff training and education. If the learning stops with the person doing the research, its organizational impact will be limited.
Think of this as a flow from research to strategy to staff development. Your learning network might include doctoral colleagues, universities, professional associations, partner organizations, and practitioners in another field. The point is not to gather the largest possible network. It is to bring useful knowledge into the organization and make sure it spreads.
An organizational innovation plan therefore needs to do more than name a promising idea. Identify the organization’s learning needs, decide where incremental or radical innovation fits, and consider the challenges facing your larger movement. In a faith-based organization, those challenges may call for fresh thinking in three connected areas: theological vision and framing, organizational strategy, and organizational culture.
Then make the plan practical. Who will you learn from? When will you meet? What documents or examples will you gather? How will the organization continue to invest in research, learning, and innovation after your current project ends?
Why Innovation Needs a Business Model
It is easy to treat a doctoral project as a one-time effort: complete the research, publish it, and move on. But that does not establish a lifelong research habit for you or a learning habit for your organization.
A viable business model does not mean every project must sell a product. It means being clear about what will support the work over time. For many leaders, the most realistic approach is to link their research to the organization’s existing model. If the work helps the organization improve, grow, or serve its mission more effectively, the organization may have a reason to support a portion of the leader’s time.
That can create a growth flywheel. Better research improves the project. Greater visibility and stronger organizational results can generate more support. That support creates time to keep researching, testing, and improving.
The opposite pattern is familiar. Someone expects a self-published book to pay for continued work, but it brings in far less than projected. Other activities demand their time. The project grows stale, and there is never a serious investment in visibility or distribution. The assumption that people will find good work simply because it exists is not a sustainable strategy.
I do not say that to discourage anyone. I say it because realistic expectations make better plans possible.
Choose an Individual Model You Can Actually Sustain
There are several ways to support an individual research practice. They have different strengths and limitations.
- Volunteer thought leadership: You publish a book or share ideas because you care about the work. This can contribute to your reputation or open professional opportunities, but you should not assume publication will pay for itself.
- Academic publishing: Peer-reviewed work can establish a reputation in academia. Sustaining it generally requires an employer that pays you to do research.
- Consulting: Books and other media support an independent practice. A common structure combines free content, paid content such as courses, and consulting services. The challenge is finding a strong enough demand for the service.
- Organizationally supported innovation: Your research addresses needs your organization already has, making continued support part of its investment in improvement.
That fourth model is the one I most want leaders to consider. Ask: How can my work help my organization enough that it will want this learning to continue?
Find the Organization’s Reason to Invest
Organizations also have several ways to support innovation. One may fund a staff member’s professional development simply because it values that person. That is generous, but it is different from making research part of an innovation strategy.
A financially strong organization may treat innovation as a long-term investment, accepting that not every idea will pay off. Another may publish a book as part of a fundraising campaign, perhaps telling its history or communicating a vision that motivates donors.
Research can also build an organization’s reputation as an innovator. That reputation may strengthen donor relationships, connect the organization to other leaders, and help it recruit and retain staff. The development of the Association of Christian Thrift Stores from work connected to Durham Rescue Mission illustrates how an organization’s expertise can grow into a wider learning network. In some cases, an initiative can develop into a subsidiary or spin-off that serves the larger movement.
These models can overlap. The useful question is not which label sounds best. It is what your organization can support, what value the work provides, and how that value will continue.
One way to think about a doctoral project is as a small experimental division within your existing organization. Give it room to explore, but also ask how its discoveries could become useful organizational practice. The depth of your innovation connections over time matters far more than a brief burst of activity around one publication.
Balance Financial Return and Mission Impact
There is an important counterpoint here. Not every valuable project needs a financial return. I have spent many years involved in recovery groups without expecting that work to pay me. A highly creative project pursued for personal fulfillment or kingdom impact can be entirely valid as a volunteer commitment.
The key is to know which kind of project you are undertaking. If it depends on continued funding, do not build the plan around the hope that it will suddenly go viral. That is not a reliable business model. And if an organization commits money it has no realistic plan to raise, the risk falls on staff and the people it serves, not just on the leader making the decision.
A matrix map helps clarify the choice by considering financial return alongside life transformation or mission impact. A project with high mission impact and little financial return may be worth doing as a volunteer effort. A project that strengthens both mission and financial sustainability offers a different opportunity. A fundraising-focused project may put financial return first. What matters is being honest about the expected results.
What My Own Innovation Project Taught Me
My doctoral work examined disruptive innovation in Christian higher education and education for people in poverty. I began by reading extensively about disruptive innovation and higher education. I connected with Michael Horn, engaged with work at the Christensen Institute, learned from education technology conferences, and built a network of Christian higher education leaders.
That research produced ideas and relationships. I later repackaged the work into a free course that reached about 20,000 students, and I developed roughly 40 ideas for radical innovation. Over the following decade, I used lean startup and action research experiments to find out which ideas worked in practice.
But I also made a mistake: I focused too much on theory and industry-wide disruption, and not enough on how to scale City Vision. Radical innovation interested me. Incremental improvement often felt more like doing homework. Yet our ability to pursue ambitious ideas was limited by revenue and our capacity to grow.
We tested two paths. One was online marketing directly to prospective students. The other was growth through organizational partnerships. After roughly two to three years of experiments, partnerships had traction while online marketing did not. That result changed where we put our effort.
Making the shift required more than declaring a partnership strategy. We hired partnership coordinators, developed a customized relationship management system, established key performance indicators, created presentations, and refined the processes used to supervise the work. We kept adjusting those pieces until they formed a functioning system. Our next scaling constraint became the development of senior leaders who share our values.
The lesson is that an innovation only becomes durable when you translate it into people, technology, processes, procedures, and policies. A visionary leader can identify a new direction, but an organization cannot depend forever on that person to provide every answer.
I also had to reconsider my networks. Some of my Christian higher education connections were less useful for the innovations we needed than secular education technology networks. At the same time, our work in Christian social services required its own relationships. The right network depends on the problem you are solving, and partner conversations can become ongoing opportunities to learn.
A Learning Organization Invests in Its People
St. Matthew’s House offers a different kind of example. In a comparison of Citygate network members’ growth from 2012 to 2024, it stood out with approximately 500% growth over 11 years. It has also developed program graduates into senior leaders, some of whom have gone on to lead elsewhere in the rescue mission movement.
Its approach connects organizational growth with staff development. St. Matthew’s House provided tuition reimbursement, built a partnership with City Vision into its culture, incorporated education into professional development plans, and secured donors for an education fund. Over five years, 68 staff members studied with City Vision, representing about a quarter of its staff. The investment was approximately $70,000 and provided an estimated 56,000 hours of education and training.
Those hours are important. Leaders sometimes concentrate on finding a brilliant idea at the top of the organization. But becoming a learning organization also requires a broad base of staff education. The problem is often not that nobody knows something useful. It is that the knowledge has not been shared widely enough to change everyday work.
One director of learning cannot deliver every hour of training an organization needs. Partnerships can expand that capacity. Buildings matter, but an organization’s people are its critical resource. Increasing their ability to lead, learn, and serve makes the whole organization more effective.
Build a Plan That Outlives the Project
A sustainable innovation strategy joins three commitments: a serious individual research plan, an organizational strategy that uses what is learned, and substantial investment in staff education. Each strengthens the others.
Identify the people you need to learn from. Test your ideas against reality. Decide what will support the work financially, or clearly choose to pursue it as a volunteer project. Then turn what works into systems and share the learning beyond yourself.
That is how a research project becomes more than a finished document. It becomes an ongoing source of innovation for your organization and the people it serves.