Impact: Taking Social Innovation to Scale

Fortunately, the world is full of great ideas and breakthrough product and process innovations, many of which might make enormous positive impact on many people around the world. Unfortunately, it takes more than just a great innovation for that impact to be realized. A social entrepreneur must figure out how what kind of organization (for-profit, non-profit, partnerships, other) it needs to advance the idea, what is its fit-for-purpose business model, how to finance and support the endeavor with traditional and/or innovative forms of financing, where and how to implement the innovation, and, critically, how to eventually scale it up to have the greatest impact. Looking beyond the initial design and startup phase, this class explores the range of issues social innovation leaders must decide to shape, finance, and scale their services or products, to build the models, metrics, partnerships, and strategies that give them the best opportunity for new social innovations to reach the hundreds of millions of people who need them the most. The class is taught again by Steve Davis, former Executive Strategy Advisor for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, former CEO of a leading NGO in global health innovation PATH, and former Director of Social Innovation at McKinsey & Company. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to look at the factors that pull innovation forward, push it from behind, and (often to the world's detriment) block its successful implementation and scaling. First grounding the discussion in research on innovation and social change, we then apply business principles, real world experiences, and several case studies to examine the way good ideas get stuck, and how good ideas can turn into innovation that matters. The course is divided into three modules - Shaping; Financing; Scaling - exploring key concepts, best practices, and critical decision points along the journey to scale. The class combines lectures, case studies, visiting practitioners and team projects focused on the business case for shaping, financing, and scaling specific social innovations. The goal is to help the next generation of social innovation leaders think more about some of the mistakes of the past, lessons for the future, and new ways of approaching old problems, all from a practitioner's point of view.