The MIS loves starting lines, preliminary sketches and early beginnings for initiatives that have the potential for socio-environmental impact. By intervening specifically in the most critical stage of a project’s roadmap, we are filling the gap in the support system available to innovations in their ideation and pre-seed phase.
Our approach
We help maximize your project's positive impact by rethinking systems to make them compatible with a sustainable future.
Contact us!MIS focuses specifically on the starting phase of a project and on eliminating the obstacles and barriers that stand between an idea with high impact potential and its implementation. It contributes to:
- identify the root causes of a persistent social and environmental problem;
- generate the solutions to address it;
- remove barriers between an idea and its realization;
- implement the idea as a vector of systemic transformation.
Our approach is rooted in intermediation, listening, user research, open innovation, co-creation, prototyping, service and social design, and innovation laboratories where users play a central role.
This approach is at the heart of a continuum of services whose teams collaborate to strengthen, enhance and support your initiatives for maximum impact.
How to innovate together?
Are you an engaged citizens and collectives seeking to move from idea to impact, and to develop a project with social and environmental benefits—as well as their own potential as agents of change?
Do you represent a public institution seeking to strengthen the public sector’s capacity to innovate, to consolidate and maximize the impact of collaborative ties between the various levels of government and territorial or sectoral communities?
Do you represent a local development organization seeking to strengthen their capacity to innovate, consolidate, and optimize their overall service offer to better meet the emerging needs of their community; or seeking to co-create, and experiment with, new solutions?
Is your company seeking to go beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR) and stand out by putting social and environmental impact at the heart of their business model and by developing links with agents of change within their markets?
Do you represent a foundation or impact investor wishing to reflect on their investments in order to increase and diversify their impact on the territories; or think about the creation of innovative financial mechanisms to support collective-impact initiatives?
Our services meet the needs of a variety of actors to realize their projects with social and environmental impact, from ideation to implementation:
- through a strategic advisory mandate or through tailor-made training sessions designed to guide you in your innovation process;
- by joining a cohort incubation program;
- by collaborating on a research and development project aimed at rethinking our systems.
Elevate the practice of social innovation
By establishing the optimal conditions for the implementation of both a greater number and a greater diversity of projects with high potential for social and environmental impact, the MIS strives to:
- Foster the emergence of social and environmental innovations in collaboration with communities and their stakeholders by harnessing innovative prototypes whose introduction, without such support, would be riskier and more difficult;
- Generate new knowledge to reduce the structural barriers innovators face;
- Equip organizations, territories, and agents of change by promoting the transfer of expertise and capacity building as undeniable forces for catalyzing change;
- Reveal the potential and impact of systemic transformation—and, more broadly, of social movements anchored in the socio- ecological transition—by amplifying the voices of communities that are seeking to innovate; and empower committed project leaders to carry their initiatives to fruition, and to the next deployment threshold;
- Link ideas that have high potential for positive impact with strategic levers of territorial and institutional implementation in Québec and Canada, thereby promoting their scaling up and accelerating systemic change.
