Are Scalability and Sustainability a Trade-off?

I came across this ted talk “India’s Hidden Hotbeds of Invention” by Anil Gupta this week.  this is not a new one but a very interesting talk showing how indigenous entrepreneurs could change people’s life. I feel that this is exactly the idea social innovation starts with. Trust the power of local people. As Anil said, minds on the margin are not marginal minds. I agreed. Inventions happen in the field, in everyday needs, not necessarily happen in the well-equipped labs in prestigious research institutions.  

Anil mentions one thing that particularly catches my attention and I actually paused and thought.  “higher the local fit, greater the chances of scaling up” and also on the slide he presented: Should scale be the enemy of the sustainability? Logic of the Long Tail, investing in ideas, technologies with limited diffusion, without the sustainability is threatened.  Wait, this runs counter to my common sense. Does scalability equal standardization in a certain sense? While it is true that the more local fit the more sustainable a project will be. So I kind of feel that scale and sustainability are trade-offs here. I recalled a certain report stating the fact that many small local NGOs can not get funding for their project because they are too rooted in the local community and could not scale up. So is Anil wrong?

I searched more on the concept of Scalability and found this article: What Do We Lose with Scale? published on the website of center for social innovation in Stanford Business school. The author thinks that there are trade-offs between scale and comprehensive locally driven solutions.  He testified the report I read before:  he has personally witnessed many funders dismiss some highly efficient solutions simply because they are not scalable to replicate or expand. Investors’ considerations are legitimate and understandable, given the limited resources they have.   They hope to find the solution that is effective locally and more importantly they want to reach more customers, buyers with few alternations, which is more financially efficiently.

I think a very critical thing here is the way we define and evaluate “scalability”. When we look at the project to judge whether it can be scalable or not, we should pay more attention to the inherent idea and the multiple approaches it uses. Maybe they are more transferrable and replicable.  However, I still have many questions:

Can the local community be better served with local community efforts and initiatives or outside problem-solver with their “scalable” solutions?  

How can we help those highly community-relevant projects alive? Should government do something in this field?

In real world, how can we measure scalability?