Cultivating ecosystem - an attractive way to expand impact

Instead of growing a social enterprise directly, one effective way to expand impact is to “cultivate the ecosystem”. It means to output technical assistance and training, to promote proven success social innovation and to helping other organizations adopt the model. This allows the organization for a far-spread impact while lowers the risk caused by growth in scale.

One of the advantage that ecosystem-building approach has is localization. Similar to for-profit sector, what people need deadly and how they want to be helped differs geographically and culturally, so localization of implementation is of importance. Being assisted with proven pattern, the “mentee” organizations are able to combine the lessons with their own experience that gained from the local community, which makes the pattern more likely to success.

Another advantage is that ecosystem-building approach makes better use of social resources. Sharing successful pattern is time-efficient for both organizations, because one does not need to make strategy of entry, while the other saves time for figuring out the right thing. Also, it improves financial efficiency by avoiding overlapping functions in one area.

However, as stated in “It’s Not All About Growth for Social Enterprises”, here are drawbacks for this ecosystem-building approach. Funders have traditionally been interested in how their money is attributable to a specific impact (e.g., my money built X number of schools). But here funders would need to accept shared contribution rather than direct attribution[1]. This may result that funders hesitate to invest. So how to make the implicit impact seems more impressive and directly to the funders? One way I think of is to ask the other organizations to exhibit the name of the ecosystem-builder in the activities or on the website. This will increase the exposure of the ecosystem-building organization so that social reputation can make up for lacking specific number.

As for quality control problem mentioned by Kimberly Dasher Tripp, the organization can firstly pick promising entities that share similar value and mission with it. With consistent direction and goal, the entities are easier to be cultivated. After the ecosystem is partly built, the pattern will be more mature so that further implementation will be smoothly conducted.

After analyzing the pros and cons of ecosystem-building approach, we come to how to do it. The most first thing the organization should do is to map the ecosystem to define their organization’s ultimate intended impact, as well as the series of steps that will lead to that impact. They must ask themselves what they want to accomplish and how each step is[2].

Then, social entrepreneurs must identify the various parts of their ecosystem, including the players and the environmental conditions that do or potentially could influence their ability to create and sustain the organization’s intended impact[3].

It seems that ecosystem approach is quite feasible. However, it has been more than 10 years since it was introduced, why is the number of successful examples small? What prevents this approach from flourishing?

---

[1] It’s Not All About Growth For Social Enterprises (Harvard Business Review Blog

Network, January 21, 2013);

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/its_not_all_about_growth_for_s.html

[2] Susan Colby, Nan Stone, and Paul Carttar. “Zeroing in on Impact.” Stanford Social Innovation Review (Fall 2004): 24-33.

[3] Paul N. Bloom & J. Gregory Dees. “Cultivate Your Ecosystem” Stanford Social Innovation Review (Winter 2008): 24-33https://ssir.org/articles/entry/cultivate_your_ecosystem