Skip to content Completely designed, developed, and managed by one of the top innovation thought leaders in the world. Your association stops observing innovation and starts producing it, and your members feel the difference in every interaction.
The most forward looking associations have already made this move. The American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology launched Rm8, an innovation lab that helps members bring new healthcare product and service ideas to market. The American Dental Association operates a Business Innovation Group exploring new technologies, products, and growth opportunities across the profession. These organizations understood something important: an innovation function is not a luxury program. It is a relevance strategy.
The problem for everyone else is capability. Benchmarking research shows fewer than 25 percent of associations have any process for driving innovation, and the gap between AI ambition and AI execution keeps widening. Building an innovation center in house means hiring rare talent, inventing a methodology, and funding years of trial and error. Most boards, sensibly, never approve it.
Center for Innovation as a Service removes every one of those barriers. We bring deep subject matter expertise in innovation center development and management, and we deliver the entire capability as a managed service under your brand. Your members get a world class center. You get it without the risk of building one from scratch.
What the center does
The purpose of the center is to provide insights, innovations, tools, products, and a wide range of other innovation support services for your members. In practice, it runs on six working functions.
Continuous scanning of your sector's technologies, competitors, regulations, and member needs, delivered as briefings your members use to plan. Your association becomes the industry's early warning system.
Practical methods your members apply inside their own organizations: assessment tools, playbooks, and frameworks drawn from decades of real innovation practice. Members leave every interaction more capable.
The center develops new tools, resources, and products for your industry, many of which become non dues revenue for the association. Innovation that funds itself is innovation that survives budget season.
Innovation education, executive briefings, conference programming, and workshops that make your events unmissable. The center gives your association something new and substantive to say all year long.
Direct support services for members working on their own innovations: advisory, evaluation, and connection to expertise. Your association becomes a working partner in members' success, not just a source of information.
The center gives your association a visible, credible claim to leadership: research it publishes, positions it takes, and a future it helps define. Sponsors and press notice organizations that lead
How we build it
We design your center around your members, your sector, and your strategic goals: its charter, its offerings, its brand identity, and its economics. You approve a complete blueprint before anything is built, so there are no surprises later.
We build the center's foundation: the research engine, the member facing tools and programs, the content platform, and the launch plan. Your association announces something real, not a press release with nothing behind it.
The center debuts to your members with immediate, tangible value on day one: briefings, tools, and programming ready to use. First impressions decide whether members see the center as substance or theater, so we make sure it is substance.
We operate the center continuously under your brand: producing the insights, running the programs, developing the products, and reporting the results. Your members experience a thriving center for innovation. Your team experiences a managed service with predictable costs.
Associations that have a center for innovation significantly increase their importance to their membership by being not just the observers, but the actual innovators.
Who delivers this work
Fractional Association Executive services are provided directly by our founder and CEO, Nicholas J. Webb, who has served some of the top brands and associations in the world. When your association engages this service, the executive in the seat is Nick himself.
Nick has served the association space for more than 30 years and is widely respected across the association marketplace. He is a multiple number one best-selling author, a recognized Human Experience® subject matter expert, and an inventor with more than 40 issued US patents. He has served as an adjunct professor and as a fractional Chief Innovation Officer for a top medical school, which awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contributions to healthcare. When you work with Membership Experience®, you are not handed off to a junior team. You get the principal, which means the quality of the thinking never gets diluted on its way to you.
Common Questions
AA permanent, branded function inside your association whose job is to provide insights, innovations, tools, products, and a wide range of other innovation support services to your members. Leading associations already run them: the American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology operates the Rm8 innovation lab, and the American Dental Association runs a Business Innovation Group. A center makes your association the place your industry looks to for what is next.
Yes, because you are not building it alone. The entire point of Center for Innovation as a Service is that we design, develop, and manage the center for you, scaled to your size and budget. A center for a state or specialty association looks different from one at a national organization, but the effect on member perception is the same: your association becomes an innovator rather than an observer.
Trend insights and briefings for your sector, innovation tools and frameworks they can use in their own organizations, new products and resources developed through the center, education programs, and direct innovation support services. The center becomes a continuous stream of forward looking value that no competitor, and no AI chat window, can replicate.
We do, under your brand, with your leadership setting direction. Our team manages the research, the programming, the tools, and the member facing deliverables, drawing on deep subject matter expertise in innovation center development and management. Your members see a thriving center. You see a managed service with predictable costs.
Through several channels: it strengthens retention by making membership more valuable, it creates sponsorable programs and content, and it generates products and services that produce non dues revenue directly. Fewer than 25 percent of associations have any process for driving innovation, so the center also delivers something harder to price: a durable claim to leadership in your industry.
