Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep is a new paper by Darcy Riddell and Michele-Lee Moore that dives deeply into an a key question that is top-of-mind for many community change agents and funders: How do we scale up the impact of a promising social innovation? The impetus for this report, jointly commissioned by the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and the Tamarack Institute, grew from the realization that highly successful local projects too often fail to demonstrate meaningful impact on the broader social and/or environmental systems they are operating within.
The insights documented in Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep were drawn from a unique cohort of individuals known as the
3 Pathways for Scaling a Social Innovation
In the field of social innovation, having a good idea that demonstrates promising results in addressing a complex social and/or ecological problem is only half of the challenge. The other half of the equation is determining how best to grow or spread the use of this good idea so that it can have greater impact. Scale is the term used to describe this second dimension of social innovation work. It is the work that focuses on the best ways to expand and accelerate the use of a promising new solution so that it has greater impact.
Promising Strategies for Achieving Scale
Moore and Riddell note that the work of scaling social innovations to effect larger scale change in social and/or environmental systems is “a more complex and diverse process than simply ‘diffusing’ or spreading a product or model.” Their research with the Applied Dissemination Group identifies three primary pathways to translate promising new approaches into efforts that result in meaningful change within systems. The three pathways for scaling are:
Beyond the identification of these three pathways, a key lesson learned from practitioners who focused on scaling their social innovation for systems impact emphasized the importance of explicitly acknowledging this shift in focus as it often required them, and their organizations, to clarify and or reframe their original purpose. This reframing of purpose typically included: 1) clearly articulating their shift in focus to emphasize the scaling their promising idea for greater impact; and, 2) Using systems thinking to examine – and affect – the root causes underling their innovation.
As the social innovator’s work shifted from implementation to scaling their promising idea, common challenges that were experienced included: an increased stress on leaders; and, the need to effectively manage organizational dynamics that accompanied the shift in purpose from implementing a promising innovation to scaling it up.
Specific strategies were employed to implement the various scaling pathways however which strategies were most effective, and how they unfolded, varied considerably depending on the pathway chosen as well as the unique context, assets and resources available in any particular situation. Generally four sets of strategies were identified as effective in scaling up promising social innovations. These strategies are:
The pathways and strategies summarized in Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep offer an important contribution to our evolving understanding of how to leverage promising social innovations for greater system impact. These insights emphasize that scaling involves a far richer and more multi-faceted appreciation of dynamics than was originally understood. This report also recognizes that, while investing in learning and the infrastructure to facilitate peer learning is resource intensive, it plays an essential role in effectively undertaking the work required to scale promising social innovations to a level where they can affect systems change.