Engendering Innovation: Reflecting on the Millennium Project.

The article comments on the Millennium Project launched by the Council on Social Work Education' Commission on Educational Policy to resolve complex problems and issues emerging within the social work profession. For the social work profession to help resolve complex problems and issues emerging within the environment, its members must explore the relationships among its current structures, functions, and conceptual frameworks, create innovative forms of social work practice, theory, and research, and develop and disseminate new knowledge into practice and education. Social science research on innovation teaches that while there may be nothing new under the sun, new combinations still come up under it. The activities of the Millennium Project and the articles in the following section suggest that, fundamentally, the Millennium Project has contributed to the process of innovation. Its work demonstrates a clarity of understanding of social phenomena that particularly concern social work educators. Just as the social work knowledge base has always encompassed a broad range of human experience and technologies, so has the Millennium Project addressed a broad spectrum of issues confronting social work education.