Scaling Social Innovation: Beyond Business and Policy

Some articles of this week elaborate on what are the fundamental elements of scaling a social venture. And I read some other article related to the same topic. At the very beginning, while judging if a social venture is worth scaling, two questions need to be answered—is the idea logically successful, and is it being able to put in practice? In order to answer those questions, social entrepreneurs have to gather evidence to look at before-after changes of the social venture and make sure that there are minimal resources and capabilities to set off scaling process. [1] During the process, staffing, communicating, alliance-building, lobbing, earning generation, replicating, stimulating market forces are the seven fundamental elements to promote scaling, [2] which require a substantial amount of human, social, political, financial, technological and natural resources. After that, to maintain a sustainable social enterprise, more actors, such as customers and government should be involved, and technology should be smartly used in order to achieve its social goals and in the meantime, keep it financially sustainable. [3]

To scale a social innovation, it not only needs business strategies to gather financial resources, but also require policy elements to evaluate the social impact, and to absorb public support. It is the combination of the two areas and even beyond them, which makes large-scale social innovation a rare case in real world.

Those articles remind me of a case in my Environmental Policy class—Cape Wind, which is a proposal to build up wind turbines for energy on Massachusetts’s coast. I think it is more of a social innovation than a pure policy project. On the one hand, the project needs to be supported by a variety of finance resources, since the fund from government is neither stable nor sufficient, and it need high-tech to cut the cost. On the other hand, the most troublesome issue is to let the public buy-in this idea. As the targeted spot—Cape Cod, is the center of tourism within that area, and lots of vested interests already existed there, it takes around 10 years to get the approval from State and Federal Government. However, the debate on this project is still going on, and wind turbines have not yet been built. I think the main problem in the process is to collect the evidence of the impact. Even there are lots of other similar wind turbine projects successfully applied in other countries and in other regions of US, residents and interest groups of that area are not fully convinced. Thus numerous reports of impact evaluation were generated, but it seemed not everyone think those reports are unbiased and impartial. My concern is, when social innovation stuck in gathering support and trust the area where multiple interests are intertwined, how to motivate its development?

[1] Is Your Social Venture Really Worth Scaling? https://hbr.org/2012/08/is-your-social-venture-really

[2] How to Take a Social Venture to Scale

[3] Two Keys to Sustainable Social Enterprise