Blankenship, Jody. “Provoking Innovation: Creating Grassroots and Intersectional Programming at Historical Organizations.” (2009)

Historical organizations cannot continue to compete in the modern marketplace using traditional models for education program development. Social networking sites and new applications are shaping the way our audiences approach their work, even more so as Generation Y/Millennials begin to flood into the workforce, changing the demographic makeup, work styles, and preferred modes of communication. This change will force historical organizations to adopt new strategies for creating relevant and meaningful programs, services, and experiences. This case study will detail how the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) used emergence theory (bottom-up, adaptive creation and development) to adapt its teacher professional development programs in order maintain relevancy to a broad audience--teachers--while also being able to adapt the programs to specific audience subsets. Then it will explore how OHS is adopting an intersectional strategy in order to create new, innovative products and services built on existing programs.