What Matters: Social Innovation: A matter of scale

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Social Innovation: A matter of scale

11 November 2011

The Takeaway

Social innovation is more than just a fashionable rebranding of traditional philanthropic activities. It refers to new approaches and tools for solving the world’s most difficult problems. While many innovative solutions have been deployed, the most important challenge now is identifying the very best of these practices and programs and replicating them to achieve global scale.

Is “innovation” the new black? It has certainly displaced old taglines from the ’80s and ’90s that were all about “solutions” and “catalysts.” Over the past decade we’ve hailed innovation, innovators, and innovative companies as the cure for all of our woes. And if that trend weren’t enough, along comes “social” innovation, a label that has been appended to hundreds of conferences, articles, and job titles over the past few years.

But what do we mean by social innovation—and does it really matter? Is it simply the rebranding of things we’ve been doing forever? And most important, will it last longer than last year’s hemlines? Will it matter to my grandchildren someday?

In its essence, social innovation simply refers to new approaches and tools for solving societal challenges. It is not simply the repackaging of old ideas. We’ve learned a lot over the past decade about what works and what doesn’t in global health, development, education, sustainability, and many other challenging areas. We’ve learned how to design and deploy interventions. We can now have a strong perspective on which interventions have the potential to truly alter the course of a deadly infectious disease or move millions of young people out of debilitating poverty, based on the evidence of actual outcomes. We believe that the very best social innovations can transform our communities with new approaches to the complex challenges of the 21st century.

However, achieving that kind of impact requires yet another step. Unless a program can be replicated and sustained on a large scale, it will not be transformational. Identifying and scaling our best solutions has become the sector’s most important challenge. To meet that challenge, we can no longer evaluate programs simply based on how well they’ve performed in a given locality. Instead, we need to factor in their potential to achieve scale. We need to channel resources to the solutions that can produce the most good for the most people. As Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, has pointed out, “Solutions to many of the world’s most difficult social problems don’t need to be invented, they need only to be found, funded, and scaled.”

It is incumbent on all of us to understand and vigorously address the barriers that prevent great ideas from turning into transformational changes. Unlike in the private sector, where successful product innovations have a clear process for gaining market share, the best social innovations are not necessarily widely adopted. The “iPods”of poverty alleviation and literacy have likely been invented and put to use by small organizations in some corner of the globe, but there is no market for identifying these breakthrough ideas and ensuring widespread adoption.

Additionally, the private-sector model of mergers and acquisitions, which leads to consolidation and ever increasing efficiency, rarely occurs in the social sector, where organizations with similar missions often find themselves pitted against one another in the competition for funds. Philanthropic funding mechanisms, with their short funding cycles, restricted project grants, and focus on new, rather than proven programs, have not always led to scaling the best social innovations. Besides organizational and financial barriers, there is often a tension between bringing social innovations to scale and ensuring that programs address the needs of local constituents.

Social innovators recognize these barriers and are working to overcome them. Our research points to four major opportunities that support our belief in the power of social innovation and provide insight into the path forward to scaling the most promising solutions:

1. Technology innovation: There has been rapid development of products that can improve the quality of life and health of the huge percentage of the world living in poverty. Water filtration systems and mosquito nets, for example, have improved health outcomes in Africa and other parts of the developing world. Compared with other social innovations that involve place-based social mobilization models, technology platforms designed for bottom-of-the-pyramid markets often scale remarkably well.

2. Geopolitical shifts: Rapid economic development in some regions and countries, including India, China, and Brazil, is bringing new resources and perspectives to social innovation at massive scale. China, for example, has moved the largest number of people out of poverty in the shortest period of time, in history. Tapping into the development lessons, increased resources, and powerful capabilities these countries are generating provides new and different fuel to the social innovation engine as well as useful insight into what could be effective elsewhere.

3. Cross-sector collaboration: We have moved beyond community solutions provided by churches, extended families, and government, to transformative innovations created through public, private, and nonprofit collaborations, including new vaccines and diagnostics, new funding mechanisms such as social impact bonds, and new educational initiatives. Many collaborative approaches take advantage of economies of scale and market mechanisms to use resources more efficiently to produce positive outcomes at greater scale.

4. Knowledge sharing: In addition to creating partnerships, increased knowledge sharing between organizations and across sectors is helping to identify the most promising solutions. For the past several decades, the social sector has been developing the capacity to evaluate and measure the impact of programs. This work provides the building blocks for the next phase of progress, in which social innovators will be able to harvest the knowledge about what works that is currently distributed across the globe in organizations large and small.

While these trends point to a tremendous flourishing of social innovation, the work of the next generation of social innovators will be to identify the ideas that produce results and ensure that limited resources are used to spread the best solutions. Imagine the impact that could be achieved if all the effort invested in addressing social problems was channeled to the widespread expansion of the most powerful programs. Bringing the best interventions to the people who need them most at a scale proportional to the size of the global problems we face is the major challenge facing the social sector, and perhaps the world.

Comment [12]

Agree? Disagree? Let us know what you think. Please include your full name with your comment. Comments may be edited.

Keep on wtriing and chugging away!

Posted 15 December 2011, 07:18 by Scout
Judith Rodin’s statement “Solutions to many of the world’s most difficult social problems don’t need to be invented, they need only to be found, funded, and scaled” seems to be missing an important observation: inventions do not need to be technical. Quite often, it’s most challenging to invent new cultural norms: expectations, rules, boundaries, and policies.

“Cultural engineering” is a huge factor affecting scalability. We live in a world where progress in technology far exceeds progress in organizational design. We need new rules defined to effectively deliver positive change to every corner of the world.

Philanthropic funds and impact investments are not the only options. I think we ought to look at leveraging existing corporate infrastructure and resources more effectively. This goes beyond CSR and funding support. In many cases solutions do not scale because they lack proper distribution channels. The practice of marketing needs to be fundamentally reinvented so it can become a powerful tool to accelerate targeted reach and sustained civic engagement.

We need to drive cross sector collaborations involving significant shifts in mindset. If Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood joined forces and applied their combined power through the lens of social innovation, we will see a big difference.

Posted 26 November 2011, 15:04 by Sharon Chang
Technology is changing at the speed of novel thought, we the people must remain flexible to change and open to the continuum of the proverbial building of a better mouse trap.

In addition, GREAT to do exactly this…

“Enhance your digital presence. It’s no longer enough to simply set up profiles on Facebook and Twitter and call it a day. Instead, establish a profile on any of the following directories and review sites and encourage customers to rate your business there for maximum exposure.

• Google Places
• Yahoo Local
• Bing Local
• Yelp
• Grubhub
• Open Table
• Urbanspoon

• Foursquare
• Savings.com
• Retailmenot
• Judy’s Book
• Citysearch
• Superpages
• Yellow Pages”

The importance of GOOGLE SEARCH EXPERT / DOMINATION | SOCIAL MEDIA is in its opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE on the WEB. This, of course, leading to DOMINANT VISIBILITY then, leading to INCREASED REVENUE [period].

All the best,
Vincent Medina
ArtfulMind.Biz
Google Search Domination Expert [search term]

Posted 17 November 2011, 12:52 by Vincent Medina
Scaling and reporting the results of a social initiative is not only important for “social investors”, it is also important for other investors, who plan similar initiatives.
We at ALJCI (www.aljci.org) create reports for each initiative covering investment feasibility, result of planned social impact and next five years plans in order to get a scalable inititiative planning and investment.
One of the inititiative of ALJCI is ALJ Poverty Action Lab, which evaluates and creates reports about social initiatives fighting with poverty globally.

Dr. Fatih Mehmet GUL
Country Manager / ALJCI – aljci.org
Founding Director / CSR Middle East – csrmiddleeast.org

Posted 16 November 2011, 16:31 by Dr. Fatih Mehmet GUL
Again like all these conversations around social innovation we need a mixed portfolio of solutions- both large and scalable and small and local. many ideas that work can’t be scaled but create significant impact in the local areas. what we need to get better at is helping those ideas that can be scaled to scale and allowing those can’t to stay as they are. The bit that we should be focusing on is scaling the knowledge sharing part, how about creating a wikipedia for the social sector/social innovation and then see what happens.

Posted 16 November 2011, 15:05 by Lucy wood
I believe grant funds are unlike venture capital funds and have no mechanism for reporting losses to the funders/philanthropist. Hence, I tend to agree that grant funds should find, fund and scale social innovations and should stay away as much as possible from inventing new untested social interventions which may be too risky. Also, thanks for sharing the four major opportunities to look for.

Posted 16 November 2011, 06:48 by Noor
I dont subscribe to the premise that the “Solutions to many of the world’s most difficult social problems don’t need to be invented, they need only to be found, funded, and scaled.” This is simply because the solutions / innovations / models available in many areas simply don’t work in new or different settings, esp. for social problems.

For e.g. rapid urbanization, slums, lack of proper road / housing infrastructure are common problems in a growing country like India. Unfortunately, the solutions like the expensive transport infrastructure from economically advanced countries, like expensive toll roads, airports etc. dont work. An expensive toll road constructed near a city does not take into account the needs of people who are so poor that they can only afford to walk or use only non-motorised forms of transport. The simple act of crossing a road becomes extremely painful for both the pedestrians and people on the cars, who pay for using such roads. Or the “modernized” airports ending up being the most expensive, the case of Delhi Airport.

Instead the “solutions” need to be home grown, that which takes into account the real needs of local society. Else, this will be the repeat of what many other “global products” (cars/mobiles etc.) which would just customize to “local” needs by axing a couple of features. No doubt these miserably failed. Only when products were developed specifically for the local society, they clicked. Be it Toyota or Ford or Nokia.

I don’t believe “social innovation” has actually started happening in sectors that really matter like Infrastructure, which could impact millions and that it can happen only from ground up, locally for it to be effective.

Regards
Vijay Sreenivasan

Posted 16 November 2011, 00:43 by Vijay Sreenivasan
Scale, larger impact, and better coverage are all related – they are achieved if we put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together. Today, there is crowding and thereby duplication in the social sector space. Too many similar organizations focusing on similar needs with different approaches – what a chaos! There is need for a consolidated view, there is need for standardization, there is a crying need for mergers and acquisitions in the non-profit/social venture space. Without that, we will never see the beautiful pattern that can emerge out of the jigsaw puzzle pieces.

Posted 16 November 2011, 00:07 by Jacob Varghese
To me, Judith Rodin’s statement “Solutions to many of the world’s most difficult social problems don’t need to be invented, they need only to be found, funded, and scaled” is simply a clear description of where The Rockefeller Foundation has chosen to spend its resources.

Your statement, “Identifying and scaling our best solutions has become the sector’s most important challenge” restricts the world of Social Innovation only to that chosen by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Your restricting Social Innovation to NOT include the “solution invention” step that creates the ‘something useful’ that an entity like the Rockefeller Foundation can “find,” is akin to your saying that: “The Stone Age ended because we ran out of stones” and “Everything that could possibly be invented has already been invented.”

Maybe, this is why, a 5th point (The Need for NEW Thinking similar to that that has transformed so many industries) is missing from your article. If you had this 5th point, maybe you would have addressed the differences that appear in solutions that are designed for scaling (i.e. making a round peg for a round hole) and those that have scaling thrust upon them (i.e. a round peg facing a square hole.)

Posted 15 November 2011, 17:46 by Ajay Bhatla
I think that “social innovation” may be the new buzzword for “policy entrepreneur.”

I like the point you put forth about the “iPods” of wicked problems have likely been implemented successfully somewhere on the globe – but the challenge is 1) identifying them 2) bringing them up to scale.

I agree semantics are important for bringing issues to the public eye and agenda-setting, but I wonder if there really are iPods for some of the wicked problems out there, and if “bringing them to scale” is feasible?

Posted 15 November 2011, 14:41 by Emma

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