Helping Communities Work

Helping Communities Work (HCW) is an open education and entrepreneurship  collaborative designed to support sustainable development through skills-based volunteering and national service organizations. HCW employs Reciprocal Entrepreneurship (RE), a discipline designed to integrate business, civic and social entrepreneurship by combining the principles of Asset-based Community Development and Service Science, first introduced by IBM as a disciplinary framework known as Service Science, Management and Engineering. 

http://www.reciprocalentrepreneurship.com  

Each volunteer is a community service "asset", and many studies of service systems and service industries reveal that the key distinguishing feature of service is the co-creation of value between service recipients and service providers. Reciprocal Entrepreneurship facilitates the co-creation of volunteering value by breaking down silos and creating unity among skills-based volunteer and national service advocates in government, industry, philanthropy and the nonprofit and arts and culture communities, The process includes those who may not ordinarily communicate yet have common social, economic and environmental goals and objectives.

The International Society of Service Innovation Professionals was formed to provide a collaborative space for professionals from all of the diverse fields that impinge on service, and to enable each of these professionals to shape her/his expertise into a more effective form for the pursuit of service innovation. Achieving collaboration among people with deep knowledge in one field with people with deep knowledge in other fields is a unique challenge for the study of service. The recent advocacy of the need for “T-Shaped” professionals is a natural outcome of service research (Barile et al, 2012).  

New theories, methodologies and empirical evidence developed and critiqued by people from many diverse disciplines are needed to advance the science, management and engineering of service. With the understanding of a service system as a complex, context-dependent network of resource integrators, one immediately sees the need for multidisciplinary approaches to innovation in service design and management.