Jon McPhedran Waitzer y Roshan Paul
Scaling Social Impact
When Everybody Contributes, Everybody Wins
Over the last decade, the notion of “scaling what works” has emerged as a broadly
shared priority across the social sector. Still, the challenge of making powerful
social innovations travel to where they are most needed continues to stymie social
entrepreneurs and their supporters. Many frustrated attempts to scale social pro-
grams can be traced to an over-reliance on the conventional wisdom of the busi-
ness sector, where efforts at scaling-up typically focus on increasing the size of
organizaciones. Sin embargo, a new paradigm has emerged in recent years that focuses
on scaling social impact without necessarily increasing the size of the organization
behind it. En efecto, Richard Bradach may have framed the current moment best
when he wrote recently that “finding ways to scale impact without scaling the size
of an organization is the new frontier for work in our field.”1
This emerging paradigm holds the promise of shaping strategies that succeed,
thanks to the defining characteristics of the social sector, leveraging the collabora-
tive potential of mission-driven innovators while keeping organizational foot-
prints—and attendant resource needs—to a minimum. More and more social
entrepreneurs are learning to embrace this approach, but strategies based on old
business-derived growth models remain prominent; much work is still needed to
complete the paradigm shift. En este ensayo, we summarize our thinking on the new
“scaling for impact” paradigm, and share some of the key stories and insights that
have come from Ashoka’s Globalizer initiative. We then outline two emerging
frameworks that might well transform the social sector landscape.
Jon McPhedran Waitzer is Program Manager of Ashoka’s Globalizer initiative, cual
he helped launch two years ago. He previously worked as a management consultant
focused on public sector effectiveness with McKinsey & Co.
Roshan Paul has helped create five Ashoka programs, most recently Ashoka Peace and
Ashoka Globalizer. Roshan has guest lectured at several universities, and he teaches
storytelling as a critical leadership skill.
© 2011 Jon McPhedran Waitzer y Roshan Paul
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THE PERSISTENT CHALLENGE OF SCALING SOCIAL INNOVATIONS
Beginning with early calls more than a decade ago, interest in scaling social change
has blossomed in recent years to include a plethora of studies and papers on near-
ly every aspect of the question. Many people start to see the challenge of scale in
the social sector when they recognize the stark contrast between social and busi-
ness entrepreneurship. Great business ideas go global to serve customers; at their
full potential they become ubiquitous. Por ejemplo, people everywhere happily use
soft contact lenses without having any idea where they first came from. Mientras tanto,
equivalent market forces are not at work in the social sector; even now, great social
innovations too often remain local.
Once they observe this discrepancy between sectors, many social entrepreneurs
naturally turn to the business world for guidance. De este modo, most scaling models focus
on increasing impact by increasing the size of the organization behind it, y esto
offers much initial comfort to their adopters: extensive supporting research, fácil
application of conventional metrics, the ability to retain operational (and emo-
tional) control over the enterprise, and comfortable familiarity for funders well-
versed in business concepts. Sin embargo, comparatively few of these models have suc-
ceeded in helping a social innovation truly take off around the world. While busi-
ness entrepreneurs are compensated for the greater complexities of a growing
organization with new revenue streams and economies of scale, social organiza-
tions generally find it increasingly difficult to secure funding for each new sub-
sidiary and experience much smaller economies of scale than their business coun-
terparts. Además, the field of social entrepreneurship is increasingly realizing
that “better management practices can create only incremental, not breakthrough
social change. . .even the best businesses cannot tell us how to change the world,
because that is not their primary purpose.”2
Dr. Steve Collins, the founder of Valid Nutrition, is one such social entrepre-
neur who has been frustrated by attempts to adapt traditional business models to
scale his impact. Several years ago, Steve revolutionized the treatment of severe
acute malnutrition by developing a new method involving individual portions of
“ready to use therapeutic food” administered directly by community members.
This approach eliminated long trips to overcrowded in-patient treatment centers,
reduced contamination risks, and ultimately cut death rates five-fold while dramat-
ically increasing coverage.3 Based on these results, and the knowledge that demand
for treatment still far outstrips supply, Valid Nutrition felt a burning obligation to
extend the impact of its work as widely as possible. Making use of the corporate
expansion model prevalent in this industry, and eager to maintain tight control
over quality, it built a factory, hired a distribution team, and established an entire
supply chain under direct Valid Nutrition management.
Very quickly, sin embargo, this approach encountered problems: revenue growth
did not keep pace with costs, and the task of directly managing so many processes
overwhelmed Valid Nutrition’s core team. Además, Steve’s team was frustrat-
ed that their highly centralized organizational model failed to adequately promote
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Scaling Social Impact
local economic autonomy and empowerment—a core value of their community-
based care ideal. Steve had bumped into one of the central difficulties in scaling
social impact: as you serve increasing numbers, the complexity of your work
increases faster than your organization’s ability to manage it.
SCALING IMPACT BEYOND THE ORGANIZATION:
A PROMISING NEW PARADIGM
Valid Nutrition is certainly not the only social organization stymied by attempts to
scale impact by growing the organization. En efecto, a consensus is emerging: social
entrepreneurs who wish to scale-up effectively must learn to transition “from an
enterprise to an ecosystem.”4 Here is one indicator: when Greg Dees first wrote
about scaling pathways in 2004,5 77 percent of social entrepreneurs were using
“branching” (setting up new offices of their organization) as their primary scaling
mechanism, but in the past two years, that figure fell to 45 percent and then 33 por-
cent among the two cohorts of Ashoka’s Globalizer Fellows. Al mismo tiempo, el
percentage of Globalizer Fellows working through partners to extend their impact
started at 70 percent in the first year and jumped up to 86 percent in the second
año. This change in approach, though unfamiliar and therefore daunting to social
entrepreneurs and funders alike, holds tremendous promise because it focuses on
spreading impact through others in ways that businesses simply cannot do.
For Steve Collins, the move from enterprise to ecosystem has involved isolat-
ing the key values at the absolute core of his mission and actively seeking out other
actors who could integrate these values into their own activities. Realizing, para
instancia, that the National Association of Small Farmers in Malawi shared his goal
of developing local economic resilience, he worked with this group to explore how
much of his factory’s input needs could in fact be sourced locally. Ahora, the associ-
ation coordinates production and quality testing among dozens of local small
farmers to ensure that Valid Nutrition fulfills its production needs locally to the
greatest extent possible. This frees up organizational resources that had previously
been directed to managing procurement, and extends local empowerment further
up the supply chain. Además, when the time came to increase production
beyond the capacity of Valid Nutrition’s first plant, Steve and his team decided
once again to seek out ways to expand their impact without adding organization-
al capacity. They partnered with independent factories in Kenya and Ethiopia,
ensuring that these manufacturers embraced Valid Nutrition’s approach to local
sourcing and capability building by partnering with small farmers’ associations
based on the model they had established in Malawi. Having thus dramatically
increased both their output and local economic development with minimal orga-
nizational growth, Valid Nutrition deepened its partnerships with UNICEF and
other large aid providers to distribute products far beyond its own organizational
reach. Finalmente, recognizing that the full problem of malnutrition is too great for any
non-governmental organization to tackle successfully, Steve has turned his atten-
tion to influencing the private sector. By demonstrating and rigorously document-
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ing the business feasibility of his innovative approach and engaging major indus-
try players in active dialogue, he hopes to spur the food industry to tackle malnu-
trition directly. In all these strategies, Steve is mobilizing diverse and substantial
global resources toward a market-based solution that his team alone could never
hope to see through.
Juergen Griesbeck, the founder of streetfootballworld, has undergone a similar
shift in focus during his scaling journey. Juergen’s vision is to connect all the
organizations around the world that use football (soccer) as a tool for develop-
mento. Through these connections, organizations refine and supplement their pro-
gramming with the best practices of others, collaborate on shared projects, and tap
into investors they could not access individually. Originally, streetfootballworld set
out to function as the central hub directing all major activity among all members
of its network. Sin embargo, this meant it had to grow in size along with the network’s
growth, which seemed unrelated to the impact it wanted to have. So Juergen decid-
ed to decouple the size of the network from the size of its core by empowering net-
work members to transact and collaborate directly among themselves. He has since
shifted his focus to pioneering new ways for network members to cultivate their
own local ecosystems, learn directly from each other, and jointly pursue shared
funding and program goals. Ahora, Juergen is adamant: “this network approach is
part of the impact.”
For Steve, Juergen, and the growing ranks of social entrepreneurs who want to
scale their impact without necessarily growing their organizations, a robust body
of scholarly work has begun to emerge around models and strategies to accomplish
este. En efecto, from Dees’s early elaboration of the multiple “pathways to scale”
beyond simple branching and franchises,6 to Bradach’s recent call to create “100x
the results with 2x the organization,”7 significant progress has been made. Still,
Ashoka Fellows have been calling for scaling guidance that has a more directly
problem-solving orientation, and to learn firsthand from the struggles and tri-
umphs of their peers who have already walked the path.
THE ASHOKA GLOBALIZER:
PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS
Two years ago, acting on the need for firsthand guidance on scaling-up, Ashoka
created its Globalizer program. Our mission was to identify Ashoka Fellows, semejante
as Steve Collins and Juergen Griesbeck, who could be role models and thought
leaders in this area, bring them together with global business entrepreneurs who
have mastered the old scaling strategies, and jointly develop practical wisdom on
scaling strategies explicitly for the social sector.
These social and business entrepreneurs constitute the Globalizer’s communi-
ty of practice. They cut across all thematic/issue areas in both sectors, and come
together at Globalizer Summit events around the world. Once there, they engage
in three days of structured interactions in order to share and develop knowledge
around emerging scaling pathways, exchange practical advice to support each oth-
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Scaling Social Impact
The Globalizer Initiative at a Glance
Launched in 2009 with financial support from the Essl Social Prize.
Functions as a cross-sector, tightly-knit community of practice, involving (a
fecha):
35 Ashoka Fellows, de 22 countries, selected based on the global social impact
potential of their innovations
40 “Panelists,” senior entrepreneurs from business and social sectors who have
scaled their innovations significantly
50+ volunteer advisors, including business leaders, McKinsey consultants, y
senior Ashoka staff
Globalizer community meets at traveling “Globalizer Summits” for intimate
one-on-one or small-group conversations to provide strategic advice to each
other and build knowledge for the field.
ers’ endeavors, and distill their stories to share with the sector as a whole. Before
each summit, participants spend several months preparing with teams of advisors
from Ashoka and our business sector partners, working to isolate or “unbundle”
the core elements within their theory of change and refine strategies for scaling
these up.
In the process of bringing these social entrepreneurs together and pushing
them forward, we have developed practical insights at two distinct levels:
1. A set of strategic imperatives that must be explored by any social entrepre-
neur seeking to scale
2. Emerging mechanisms for scaling impact beyond one’s organization
Strategic Imperatives for Entrepreneurs Seeking to Scale
Through two Globalizer summits and a host of global conversations, the central
tenet of scaling for impact has been clear: let loose a well-defined idea to create a
movement or mission-aligned ecosystem, rather than only growing the
organization behind it. Out of the many sessions organized around this theme,
two strategic imperatives have shone through: liberate the core and become a
magnet.
Liberate the core. To really help an idea travel, social entrepreneurs must return
to the essence of why they started their work. Too often their organizations have
grown opportunistically—expanding and evolving based on funding or connec-
tions available at a given time, rather than with a clear focus on their original mis-
sion and full market potential. As one Globalizer participant put it, “I started the
organization to work on a problem. Somewhere along the line, building the organ-
ization became larger than the mission. This was hard to get out from.”
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Two further nuggets of practical insight have emerged from discussions
around this imperative. Primero, and often most difficult, the role of the founder must
cambiar. At a certain point, founders must empower their team to lead operations,
and institutionalize implicit knowledge to focus time and energy on spreading the
visión. For charismatic leaders who have nurtured their innovation from infancy,
this transition can be more difficult than anything that came before. One social
entrepreneur described it as a process of “killing idols, whether individuals or the
organization.” Although it can be an excruciating task, creating impact outward
from the founder is essential if it is to spread beyond the organization.
The second insight is the need to ride your own wave before you jump into
another pond. Taking time to test and refine a core operational (and revenue)
model before attempting further expansion always pays off. This is naturally more
difficult for those working to scale their impact beyond their own organization.
But this is the very reason that it is crucial to align on shared goals and outcomes
in order to build coherence across an ecosystem of mission-driven actors. Llevar
Steve Collins’s example: his early investment in rigorously documenting the feasi-
bility of Valid Nutrition’s business model is allowing him to focus the resources of
major industrial players directly on malnutrition, creating a quantum leap in social
impacto.
Become a magnet. Scaling impact beyond one’s organization represents a radi-
cal jump in efficiency. Pero, like any scaling program, it requires additional
resources to succeed. Paradójicamente, it can be much harder to secure funding for
such a strategy than for more traditional approaches, as most funders are still root-
ed in the old paradigm of growing organizations in order to scale their social
impacto. Still, to become a real magnet for growth, social entrepreneurs must tran-
sition their business model from one where they are at the center to one where they
have a network of actors (funders included) who all revolve around a common
mission.
In trying to fulfill this daunting imperative, members of the Globalizer com-
munity urge other social entrepreneurs to know when to go elephant hunting:
sometimes one risky breakthrough is worth more than 1,000 small successes.
Several Globalizer Fellows credit a single crucial relationship that catapulted their
impact far beyond what they could have built incrementally. Passing up smaller
opportunities in order to doggedly pursue (and then carefully manage) these part-
nerships can pay enormous dividends. Al mismo tiempo, these social entrepreneurs
all caution against becoming overly dependent on one powerful partner. Su
advice: immediately help any such collaborator to see itself within the larger mis-
sion-focused ecosystem in order to spread its power and influence across a larger
number of stakeholders.
Several social entrepreneurs have also begun embracing education as a magnet
for spreading their vision. Whether by starting their own training campuses or
partnering with academic institutions to shape formal curricula, this approach
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allows them to attract increasing numbers of changemakers who contribute new
ideas and resources to the mission.
Finalmente, it is important to find ways to creatively recover some of the value you
create, ideally as close as possible to your impact/beneficiaries. Por ejemplo, street-
footballworld found that network members were more than willing to cover the
costs of organizing all gatherings and exchanges. De este modo, asking collaborators to
materially support valuable processes can sometimes be the easiest way to trans-
form beneficiaries into co-creators.
EMERGING MECHANISMS FOR SCALING IMPACT
BEYOND THE ORGANIZATION
As the Globalizer community explored mechanisms to extend social impact
beyond the organization, two approaches stood out. These are not new pathways
per se but ones where the key principles needed for adoption and widespread use
have not yet been developed adequately. Ellos son:
1. Open-source changemaking
2. Smart networks
We now briefly describe each of these pathways to scale and propose the build-
ing blocks of an intellectual framework that will be critical for entrepreneurs to use
in refining and adopting them. By developing these mechanisms, we don’t mean to
imply that social entrepreneurs must choose between them, or indeed between
these and other approaches. En efecto, encima 75% of the Globalizer Fellows are using
a combination of different scaling models, which may be necessary, given the com-
plexity of the systems they’re trying to change. Nor do we imply that these princi-
ples are iron-clad and comprehensive; they are merely a beginning, an evolving
framework based on what our community is seeing, aprendiendo, and doing.
Yet we also believe that both pathways have the potential to strongly impact the
way social entrepreneurs scale-up in the future, and that the principles below not
only get at how to make them work but also are key to the very nature of the lead-
ership that social entrepreneurs provide.
1. Open-Source Changemaking
In a world of constant change and multiplying problems, two approaches—work-
ing behind closed doors, and leadership by an indispensable individual—are
becoming relics of the past. An article in Management Innovation Exchange noted:
The job description of the leader has officially changed from “smartest
guy in the room” to chief promoter of the idea that “nobody” is as smart
as “everybody”. . .It’s the leader’s job to invite as many smart people into
the room as possible, to create opportunities for and channel contribu-
tions from the broadest mix of people—wherever they sit in the organi-
zación (or the world).8
We must open up opportunities to increasing numbers of people to collaborate for
a common purpose: the heart of all social changemaking.
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The open-source model is a powerful way to do this because it taps into peo-
ple’s natural motivation. As TED’s Chris Andersen points out, three things appear
to be driving open innovation: (a) a crowd of people who share a common inter-
est, even if they relate to that interest in different ways (as innovators, evangelists,
even skeptics); (b) an interest that is visible and open to all to enable people to
demonstrate the full extent of their creativity; y (C) a personal desire within par-
ticipants to improve their ability to contribute to something larger than them-
selves.9 Andersen’s conclusions are in line with emerging thinking from behavioral
economics and psychology, which shows that people perform best (and often irre-
spective of financial considerations) when they are challenged appropriately but
can respond on their own terms and in a way that both recognizes them for their
mastery and makes a larger contribution to the world.10 In other words, your stake-
holders do things for you not because they have to, but because they want to.
Open-source communities tap into all of these underlying elements of motivation.
The open-source approach has five basic principles.
Ensure trust and transparency. People are more likely to contribute their ideas
if they are confident that others won’t exploit the contribution. An effective open-
source strategy sets up norms and protocols governing each transaction, which sets
up a foundational culture but also makes clear to every user just how their and oth-
ers’ contributions are treated.
Foster a culture of meritocracy. Because all contributions are transparent and
open to discussion, usually the best idea wins. En efecto, the best open-source plat-
forms have a clear ladder of engagement (es decir., “White Belt” to “Black Belt”) en
which users understand what they need to do in order to progress. This can be
extremely obvious (p.ej., sellers’ ratings in eBay) or more subtle (p.ej., the more
active moderators in Wikipedia become more influential over time).
Open up to possibility. It is a fact of our world that we do not know where the
next innovation will come from. Being open and transparent creates unforeseen
windows of opportunity, with myriad unforeseen outcomes. On the flip side, cómo-
alguna vez, it also requires giving your own contribution away without expecting a quid
pro quo return. There can often be a “long tail” in open-source work: return on
investment accrues over time.
Seek rapid diffusion. Because the frameworks you use to communicate can be
opened up to everyone for feedback, innovation happens quicker and ideas spread
faster. A great example of this is the well-known story of Ashoka Fellow Darrel
Hammond’s KaBOOM! It builds playgrounds in low-income communities across
the United States with the goal of giving every child a safe space to play within
walking distance of their home. When KaBOOM! made the decision to open-
source its playground model, it found that in a single year (2009), other people
built as many playgrounds as KaBOOM! itself had built in the previous 14 years.11
En efecto, today “local communities build 10 KaBOOM!-influenced playgrounds for
each one KaBOOM! builds itself.”12
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Encourage mutability. Because the world is so vastly diverse, the same idea
looks different in different places. These differences can be harnessed as innova-
tions across the community. By its very nature, open source makes it easy to start
variations (translations, geographic adaptations, new beneficiaries) that ultimate-
ly enhance beneficiaries’ satisfaction.
Open Source and the Social Entrepreneur
Given these principles, how do the roles of social entrepreneurs change as they
open-source their innovations? The primary conceptual shift is realizing that they
must move from being “king of the hill” to becoming the hill itself. From eBay to
Facebook to Wikipedia, the best open-source approaches focus on transforming
beneficiaries into co-creators, to becoming the platform upon which users inno-
vate and shape how everyone uses it. Ecosystems and platforms are more inclusive
than organizations, and perhaps even more so than movements.
Open Source and Your Organization
Another critical step is to open-source change within the organization itself.
Several Globalizer Fellows realized that they no longer had the right people on the
equipo. En otras palabras, the team that enabled them to reach their current level of
accomplishment may not help them get to the next level of impact. As one social
entrepreneur noted, “The team working on liberating the core won’t help us
become a magnet. I might need a parallel structure, even maybe a new organiza-
tion.” And you know you’re succeeding when the best new ideas for progress come
not from you but, cada vez más, from others in your organization.
Although open source is not a panacea, and indeed it could be just one element
of a scaling strategy, it can be a tremendous accelerator of innovation as well as a
great strategy for building stakeholder loyalty. Success is measured not in terms of
achieving measurement indicators or fulfilling a project plan but in the growing
number of users who become co-creators. If you feel that you are spending all your
time pushing a rock uphill rather than being a magnet attracting others to you,
then you aren’t doing it right. Por otro lado, you know you are succeeding
when your beneficiaries-turned-co-creators further innovate your original contri-
bution beyond your own wildest dreams. When everybody contributes, everybody
wins.
2. Smart Networks
The 21st century will be marked by integrated thinking, interdependent action, y
international systems change. It is no longer either feasible or perhaps even desir-
able for a single person, organización, or group to achieve large-scale complex
social change alone. What is required now is tapping the power of interconnecting
networks to generate lasting results.
Smart networks can help us achieve the scale we need. Smart networking
means leveraging or collaborating across networks in ways that are greater than the
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sum of their parts. Por el contrario, “unsmart” networks are those that are not coordi-
nated or that rely too much on one central member.
Five basic principles also apply to smart networks.
Ensure diversity at the core. The core or center of the network is better when it
is more diverse because that makes it possible to reach out to new ideas and
resources from multiple avenues. On another level, it’s also important to expand
the network’s periphery—the people on the edge of the network—both to bring in
new perspectives that could lead to breakthroughs, and to provide pathways for
spreading new ideas and practices. Greater diversity at the core leads to better par-
ticipation of diverse communities at the periphery.
Expand virally. This happens by engaging groups beyond the current member-
barco. By helping people explore many collaborative projects that together give rise
to rich insights and creative breakthroughs, smart networks open new pathways
for success. Por ejemplo, Juergen Griesbeck’s streetfootballworld limits the num-
ber of new network members but empowers all its members to create their own
football-for-development ecosystems, with the other members providing guidance
on governance, ecosystem culture, and quality control.
Be “glocal.” Smart networks must operate on many levels (local/regional/inter-
national) to be transformative. Learning and breakthroughs flow from local prac-
tice and are re-mixed through analysis and comparison with other projects. Global
redes, Sucesivamente, also infuse local projects with new perspectives and ideas. El
core orientation of streetfootballworld is that change happens locally but the
architecture for coordination among the network members needs to be designed
from a global perspective.
Give to get. Smart networks require generous sharing to provide value to oth-
ers, which makes these networks powerful, cost-effective tools to increase access to
información, financiación, and other resources. For instance, Kovin Naidoo, a
Globalizer Fellow from South Africa, once spent a large amount of time and orga-
nizational energy leading a coalition that was instrumental in sealing a very large
grant for substantial work across South Africa—but his organization, el
International Centre for Eyecare Education, didn’t receive any of the funds.
Sin embargo, other members of the coalition later approached them to carry out sig-
nificant aspects of the work, and they ended up getting a better outcome than if
they were one of the initial grantees.
Foster network leadership. Smart network leadership requires a readiness to
develop a common agenda, agree on mutually reinforcing activities, and commit
to continuous follow-up. Such leaders—network weavers, if you will—actively set
up these systems and shape the different interactions between members (collabo-
ration, comunicación, aprendiendo) to move toward the larger mission.13 Yet success-
ful network leaders also see their role as moving away from the core in due course,
becoming another node in the network rather than the hub itself, as figure 1
shows.14
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Cifra 1. The Evolution of a Smart Network.
Smart Networks and the Social Entrepreneur
What is the role of the social entrepreneur in harnessing or developing a smart net-
trabajar? One of the first trust-building activities is for members to work on smaller
projects together, so they can express shared values and shared purpose and nego-
tiate over the points of difference in an endeavor where the stakes are not as high.
Once the network is activated, a key strategic task is to ensure that the members
put pressure on each other to deliver—so that they move beyond good intentions
to putting in the hard collaborative work needed for impact. Y, críticamente, success
becomes clear when the social entrepreneur not only moves away from the center
of the network to become a node, but potentially moves out completely. A major
goal of smart network leaders is to help others become network leaders.
Smart Networks and Your Organization
To integrate the value of smart networking within the organization itself, Juergen
Griesbeck ensures that all the staff members of streetfootballworld are trained to
think in, and engage in, redes. Similarmente, Kovin Naidoo spends 30 percent of his
time cultivating networks for the mission of access to low-cost eye care for the
poor, and his staff members typically spend up to 15 precent of their time doing
the same. For smart networking to succeed, leaders must allocate human and
financial resources among all participating organizations. But mission networkers
are still a rare species, and networking is rarely included as a budget item. De este modo,
although networking and collaboration are high on the change-making agenda,
they rarely happen in a sustained way. This must change.
CONCLUSIÓN
Given the increasing adoption of both open-source changemaking and smart net-
working as key pathways to scaling social impact, it’s important to consider imme-
diate challenges. Por ejemplo, how do social entrepreneurs learn to emotionally let
go of their programs enough to let others take them in truly new and unforeseen
directions? How can they operate effectively in a world conditioned to pursue iso-
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lated impact, often driven by isolated investing from a donor community that
(despite notable exceptions15) does not yet recognize that large-scale success will
come only from collaboration? And if success does not conform to our standard
modes of measurement and resource allocation, how will organizations justify
spending resources on these new pathways? These are the types of challenges fac-
ing all innovators—and thus the issues that the next series of scaling innovations
will most likely address.
Despite the challenges, both open-source changemaking and smart networks
have much in common that points to the future of scaling social impact. A central
tenet is the notion that the purpose or mission must be the center of attention, no
the organization or the social entrepreneur. The social sector must move into “mis-
sion networking” rather than “organizational networking”: decentralized networks
nurturing collaboration from the bottom up will have more impact than central-
ized organizations, even those with a brilliant strategy developed from the top and
cascaded out. Segundo, both mechanisms are strongly opportunistic, not only tak-
ing advantage of chance encounters, breaking news, and the appearance of new tal-
ent, but also actively relying on and planning for such occurrences. Tercero, ellos son
characterized by a spirit of abundance and the unconditional sharing of ideas, peo-
por ejemplo, investigación, y tiempo, even though this generosity may require short-term eco-
nomic sacrifices. Y, finalmente, they ride on an acceptance that may be hard for some
social entrepreneurs: others might be able to do a better job. This in turn requires
letting go of personal ego, brand, propiedad intelectual, and the other elements of
our organizational conditioning in order to maximize the number of changemak-
ers across the ecosystem. As Wei-Skillern and Marciano put it, when social entre-
preneurs share “the pursuit of their mission,” they “have far more impact than they
could ever have on their own.”16
Al Etmanski, a Globalizer Fellow from Canada who has successfully pioneered
several social enterprises over a distinguished career, goes even further:
Over the last 25 years I’ve discovered that what I thought were ecosystem
approaches were in fact strategies and tactics. This lens of smart networks
and open source takes me away from first focusing on strategy and tac-
tics before going to the ecosystem, to instead focusing first on the ecosys-
tem and from there defining strategy and tactics. This is a substantial
cambiar!
It will also not be an easy change. But social entrepreneurs have always been peo-
ple who can see over the horizon, who can envision new possibilities such as the
fact that poor people might be willing and able to pay back micro-loans. So if any-
one can lead this type of change, it is the likes of Steve Collins and Juergen
Griesbeck and the dozens of other social entrepreneurs who have seen beyond the
horizon and are quietly shaping new pathways to scale their vision. Y, in doing
entonces, they are ensuring that the best ideas reach their full potential: solving
intractable social problems and improving countless lives around the world.
154
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Scaling Social Impact
Agradecimientos
Special thanks to Jack Edwards and Stephen Song for significant contributions to
this essay. Thanks also to Sushmita Ghosh, Helen Turvey, Anamaria Schindler, Junio
Holley, Jerry White, Juergen Griesbeck, Steve Collins, and the other 100+ miembros
of the Ashoka Globalizer community of practice.
1. j. Bradach, “Scaling Impact: How to Get 100x the Results with 2x the Organization,” Stanford
Social Innovation Review 6, No. 3 (2010): 27-28.
2. l. Crutchfield and H. M.Grant, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (san
Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass, 2008).
3. PAG. Bahwere, k. Sadler, S. Guerrero, and Steve Collins, Community-based Therapeutic Care (CTC):
A Field Manual (Oxford: Valid International, 2006).
4. j. Elkington and P. Hartigan, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create
Markets that Change the World (Cambridge, MAMÁ: Harvard Business School Press, 2008).
5. j. GRAMO. Dees, B. B. anderson, y j. Wei-Skillern, “Scaling Social Innovation: Strategies for Spreading
Social Innovations,” Stanford Social Innovation Review 1 (2004): 34-43.
6. Dees et al, Scaling Social Innovation.
7. Bradach, “Scaling Impact.”
8. PAG. La Barre, “We Work in Public” (blog entry, Sep. 9, 2010). Available at http://www.manage-
mentexchange.com/blog/we-work-public.
9. C. andersen, “How Web Video Powers Global Innovation,” TED Talk, Septiembre 2010. Disponible
at http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html.
10. Por ejemplo, see Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth of What Really Motivates Us (Nuevo
york: Riverhead, 2009).
11. h. McLeod Grant and K. Fulton, Breaking New Ground: Using the Internet to Scale. Un estudio de caso
of KaBOOM! (The Monitor Institute). http://kaboom.org/monitor_report.
12. McLeod Grant and Fulton, Breaking New Ground.
13. j. Holley and V. krebs, Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving. Disponible en
http://www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf.
14. j. Wei-Skillern and S. Marciano, “The Networked Nonprofit,” Stanford Social Innovation Review
(Primavera 2008): 38-43.
15. j. Kania and M. Kramer, “Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review (Invierno 2011):
36-41.
16. Wei-Skillern and Marciano, “The Networked Nonprofit.”
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