Nesta Event: Making It Big

Last Tuesday I attended the launch at Nesta of their report ‘Making it big: Strategies for scaling up social innovation’. This report was written by Madeleine Gabriel and aims to help social innovators think through the best scaling options for them. It looks at how others have developed their scaling strategies, reflects on the benefits and challenges of different options, and shows how social innovators have tackled these in reality.

To launch the report, Nesta gathered together an impressive and diverse group of social innovators, social innovation researchers and policy makers. The day began with a welcome from Geoff Mulgan, Nesta Chief Executive, reflecting on the fact that while a larger size is often seen as a straightforwardly good thing, we should also remember Schumacher’s motto that ‘Small Is Beautiful’ and recognise that for some organisations it will not be appropriate to grow beyond a certain point. Madeleine acknowledged this point in her report by using a definition of scale which focused on impact rather than size: ‘Social innovations can be said to have scaled when their impact grows to match the level of need.’ That said, given the amount of social need in the world, this definition does raise questions about whether any social innovation could be said to have successfully scaled, or whether this must almost always represent an aspiration. For example, Emmaus is a well-known international charity which helps those who are socially excluded to generate income to support themselves. Although they have now scaled their model across many countries world-wide, social exclusion remains such a significant problem that it is doubtful that they could ever resolve it singlehandedly.

The first speaker at the conference was Madhav Chavan, the co-founder of Pratham, who presented via Skype. Pratham was founded in 1994 in India and has grown to be the largest non-governmental provider of quality education for India’s poorest children. Madhav discussed his own scaling story, which is included in Madeleine’s report. Pratham is a poster child for ‘frugal innovation’, having scaled initially by making its early education programme (Balwadi) simple to implement and with low associated costs. The organisation identified that the interaction between student and teacher was key to the Balwadi’s success, and therefore other factors that could have acted as barriers to scaling could be sidelined. For example, no rent is paid for classroom spaces – classes are run in locations such as temples, outside spaces or teachers’ homes. Madhav explained how by focussing on what was core to the innovation and minimising costs, they were able to scale the model across many different Indian cities. Hearing him talk however did raise questions for me about how easily such a model could be applied to a country such as the UK, where childcare and education are so heavily regulated.

After Madhav spoke, Madeline gave an overview of her report and its key findings. She presented a diagram from the report which illustrated the stages in developing a scaling strategy. At first, she suggested that innovators should ask themselves what their goals for scaling are. The answer to this question will then inform which aspects of their model they choose to scale up, and the route they should take to make this happen, which in turn will inform the steps they take to prepare. For example, innovators should ask themselves whether they wish to scale the organisation, the delivery mechanism or a supporting platform. The report goes into detail regarding each of these stages and tells the stories of several innovations which have successfully ‘made it big’. Madeleine noted that there are many routes to scale and also that we should not ignore the role of funders and intermediaries in supporting social innovators to maximise their impact.

After Madeleine spoke, we broke into groups in order to have table discussions with eight social innovators and learn more about their scaling journeys. I spoke to Nigel Ball, who is the associate director of Innovation at Teach First. Teach First’s Leadership Development Programme has scaled to such an extent that it is now the biggest graduate employer in the UK, and in addition their model has been credited by Michael Gove as inspiring many of his own educational reforms. In addition to this, Teach First were identified in research carried out by the Centre for London as one of four key factors that had allowed disadvantaged children in London to outperform those in other parts of the country. While continuing to expand their Leadership Development Programme, Teach First are now looking into new ways to achieve their goal of decreasing educational inequality within the UK. One of these is through Teach First Innovation, which tries to scale up innovative solutions to educational inequalities that are identified through their network of teachers and ambassadors. This includes supporting social enterprises which are dedicated to achieving this goal. Although some might disagree with their analysis of the reasons why educational inequalities persist, the Teach First story is certainly an example of an organisation which is prepared to try a variety of different approaches beyond its initial model, in pursuit of one core goal.

After the breakout, there was a session led by Brenton Caffin, Director of Skills at Nesta. He asked participants to write down the answers to which three things (apart from money) would improve our organisations’ readiness to scale, and also to write down our desired route to scale in 25 words or less. He then asked participants to tweet the results, which make interesting browsing and can be found in the Storify of the event. Finally, there was a panel discussion on the roles of other organisations in scaling social innovation. This involved Dan Sutch from Nominet Trust, Amanda Feldman from Volans and Nathan Elstub from Social Finance. Amanda mentioned being excited about the potential for more meaningful collaboration between social innovators and corporates in order to scale social impact. Dan talked about the way that the Nominet Trust provides support, focusing on the funding gap that social enterprises often experience between invention and investment, and also emphasising the importance of the user experience in ultimately deciding whether a social innovation will gain the necessary traction. Comments from the audience highlighted the North-South divide in the UK around skills and finance support for social innovators, and also emphasised the need for more interaction between researchers and practitioners to share experiences and lessons.

The event ended with a networking lunch, which provided an excellent opportunity for that important interaction between researchers and practitioners! This was an extremely well planned event, with stimulating discussions and a great mix of delegates. I was left pondering many questions and ideas, some of which could easily be the subject of another report. In particular, I would be interested to explore further the tensions between ensuring quality and enabling scale that were highlighted in the Nesta report, and which have also emerged as themes in our Tepsie research on the subject.

For more detail, the report can be found here and the Storify of the event here.

Photo Credit: Shereen M via Compfight cc