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In the end, social innovation is about impact.
We're all trying to have a meaningful, positive effect on the world,
whatever that might mean to us.
And if we do this, if we're actually successful,
this is going to take us sooner or later to the question of scale.
How do we grow that innovation?
Think about Street Store.
They ended up with a model that allowed them to create, with very low resource
investment, pop-up stores on the street that provided clothing for people in need.
Successful model, attractive model, easy to describe.
What do they do with that?
What are their options for trying to spread that in the world?
So it turns out that Street Store have a number of options.
They can plan for organizational growth and
expansion like the organization BRAC from Bangladesh did.
BRAC now is the largest non-governmental organization in the world.
And quite famous for developing private models for social service delivery.
BRAC is now more than a 100,000 employees in 14 countries,
reaching 126 million people.
So, the street store could have become Street Store Cape Town,
Street Store Mumbai, Street Store Sao Paulo.
But they didn't.
The other routes they could think about taking is through replication or
social franchising.
An organization called ChildLine started in India
developing telephone crisis counseling for children.
And it realized it needed to spread through many of the cities in India.
In doing so, it created a very strong brand, a single telephone line for
the crisis counselling, and quite clear standard operating procedures around
how children should be treated and managed in times of crisis.
And so what they did was created a franchise around their social model
to allow different organizations and resources to take up and
become part of the ChildLine network of franchisees.
A slightly broader strategy, that an organization like Street Store could take
would be to focus on developing partnerships.
Not just partnerships of service delivery, but a kind of broader set of partnerships
with government with other kinds of industry players.
In order to make that innovation diffuse more widely.
So mothers2mothers is taking something of this approach.
And this is a particularly powerful approach in complex environments where
there are lots of different players.
So healthcare delivery obviously has lots of government agencies at work.
Lots of private and public and
independent nonprofit entities like hospitals, etc., medical schools.
There are many pieces to the healthcare delivery.
So mothers2mothers will be trying to develop those partnerships and
share pieces of their innovation among that ecosystem.
So, for example, they actually try to get their mentor mothers hired to become part
of other organizations within that system, rather than trying to keep them all
as mothers2mothers employees, so that's one of their strategies.
We can also take a policy approach.
Trying to change the rules of the game, so lobbying government, lobbying trade and
industry associations to kind of alter regulations and laws.
Current work around developing the benefit corporation, the B corp,
or other similar models.
Which are a ways to take that hybrid model of something that's both a social and
an economic business and to try to put it into law and
create corporate structures for it that will allow those businesses to thrive.
And so we see a lot of this work going on in many different countries around
the world, in one sense trying to develop very clear sets of rules and regulations.
But also having to have those rules and regulations be adapted in each
different legal and cultural context that they're in.
Another way of trying to set the rules in order to scale and
diffuse an innovation is through market forces.
And the creation of standards and certifications has been one of the routes
that social innovations and enterprises have used in order to reach that scale.
Take fair trade, for example,
which started off as really an advocacy of an ethical way of trading.
Trying to guarantee farmers of cocoa and of coffee reasonable and
fair prices for their products.
But by creating the certification and standards and
creating a consumer demand for these products,
they were able to really scale up and mainstream Fair Trade practices.
Final way Street Store could think about diffusing and
scaling in social innovation is a much more open way, by letting others adopt and
adapt what they've done through mechanisms like open source.
We've seen the rise of creative common provide a set of different
licenses that allow others to really take your model,
your process, your intellectual property, your program, and
do with it as they feel is best adapted to their needs and circumstances.
And that's exactly what Street Store did.
They provided their designs, their marketplace, their branding materials.
And a description of the experiences open to the world,
allowing anyone to create their own pop up Street Store.
And that's exactly what happened.
There's another important scaling question beyond just how we're going to
scale, what models are we going to use to diffuse what we doing.
And that is, what are we trying to scale in the first place?
Not always so obvious.
So we think about Rlabs.
They could be scaling a product, right?
Some of the work that they've done is to develop particular pieces of
software, for example.
And they can get that out however they might.
They could also be scaling program or process, so as an educational
organization, they've developed lots of different kinds of courses.
Material around those courses, curricula for that.
They could be scaling those out as well.
They could be scaling their overall organizational form,
how does an R Labs work?
How do you set it up, what does it look like?
What kind of staffing do you need?
Those things are kind of concrete,
you can put them on paper and explain them to other people.
But that's not all that's happening at a place like R Lab,
so one of the powerful innovations I think there is in the experience people have.
When they come into RLabs, they have an experience of hope and connectedness and
renewed optimism in the world.
It's very powerful.
And it's not just for people taking their courses.
We feel that every time we walk in there, and so
do most of the people that I've ever talked to have had contact with RLabs.
So what if I want to scale that experience?
What if I want to scale hope as they talk about?
What does that mean and how do we do that?
We can't just put it on paper.
Now we're talking about scaling a value, scaling something intangible.
But that can also often be at the core of an innovation.
And finally, we often focus on scaling solutions, answers to questions.
But many of the most powerful social innovations that I know
are actually the result of powerful questions.
So in some ways, RLabs is driven not by an answer but by a question.
Very similar to what we talked about in week two, where we look around us and
say, what do we have here in our communities and
in the people that we're working with, that is hopeful,
that provides promise, something that we can work with and develop over time?
What's beautiful around us?
And that kind of a question is really what's galvanized innovation in our lives.
So how do you scale a question instead of an answer?
Ultimately, we're not really asking you to figure all of this out as you get started.
In fact, most of these kinds of issues,
models, approaches really will emerge over time as you engage with your innovation.
We just want you to be aware of the possibilities and
as you go through your many successes and undoubtedly failures.
And as these failures feed back into your knowledge and
the evolution of the work you're doing, you'll have a sense of the playground that
there is out there now in the world and that continues
to grow different ways to diffuse and scale the work that we're doing.
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François BonniciDirector
Warren NilssonAssociate Professor
Marlon ParkerFounder
