We Need More Evaluators

The culprit appears to be bureaucracy. The federal government’s plethora of regulations, limited organizational classifiers, and failure to implement policies has apparently led to a social innovation ecosystem that is underperforming. This is an oversimplification. An ecosystem is much too complicated to identify a few culprits let along one. And this argument fails to consider the context of the social innovation initiative that is being discussed. Context is important.

Context is also what is overlooked in the conversations. A number of articles identify the key challenges to social entrepreneurship as scale and speed. According to the Economist article, “Let’s hear those ideas,” we have enthusiasm, good ideas, and innovative project but scale and speed are missing.[1] A caveat about focusing on scale: impact may be decreased as scale is enlarged to increase impact. There are so many subtle nuances that may critically factor into an innovation’s success. How will we recognize that a program launched in one city will translate to success nation wide? “One continuing challenge will be to figure out what types of evaluation work at which stage of the scaling-up process.”[1] The more important question is who will recognize these factors?

While we are building our ecosystem with federal organizations, for-profit and non-profit organizations and encouraging social entrepreneurs, we should be building our capacity to evaluated existing and new programs. Evaluation is an expertise and a skilled labor force that must be cultivated. Evaluation is also the linchpin between executing a program and determining success.

I like Michele Jolin’s proposal in “Innovating the White House.” Jolin proposes a White House organization that respects the different stages of social innovation (including context of the original innovation, Stage 0 of an evaluation) and the need for an investment of resources at each stage.[2] The proposal includes the creation of a White House Office of Social Innovation and Impact and tools including a Social Innovation Fund, a Grow What Works Fund, and an Impact Fund. The Impact Fund is proposed to provide federal dollars to better evalue their impact and successes.

[1] Let’s Hear Those Ideas (The Economist, August 12, 2010); www.economist.com/node/16789766

[2] Innovating the White House (Jolin, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2008, pgs. 23-24); www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/innovating_the_white_house