Scaling impact

On Friday I attended the WILCO final conference which took place in Brussels. The project has generated some real insights and for me personally, identified a number of issues which are worth furth...

A recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review explores the benefits and challenges of cross-sector coalitions in addressing complex social problems. John Kania and Mark Kramer argue tha...

In the last decade the global food system has become more hierarchical and complex than ever; the customer has become further detached from the sources of their food while a handful of large compan...

The concept of the ‘sharing economy’ – a world where access to goods and services trumps ownership – now has major traction. The concept is being proved by the success of nu...

KaBOOM! Using the internet to scale impact Darell Hammond and Dawn Hutchison founded KaBOOM! in 1996 after Hammond read a tragic story of two children suffocating to death while playing in an aband...

Impact Investment Impact investment is a growing field looking to find market solutions to the problems of global poverty. It aims to achieve good financial returns while creating positive social o...

Transforming whole systems has never been more important. Youth unemployment, poverty, addictions, crime and criminalisation, low levels of educational attainment amongst vulnerable groups and home...

On June 19th 2012 it was announced that 10 million guest nights had been booked on Airbnb, an online service that matches people seeking short-term accommodation with people who have rooms to rent....

Although there is growing interest in the potential for social entrepreneurs to tackle social problems, a persistent issue is their ability to scale up their operations. The Big Venture Challenge &...

The Danish welfare system is traditionally based on a large public sector. With the average working Dane paying 44,2% in marginal tax, the public sector is expected to be the actor that detects soc...

On 6 October 2015, experts from both sides of the Atlantic gathered at the German Center for Research and Innovation in New York City to discuss what success factors lead to lasting social change, ...

I have just read an article by Krzysztof Wittels entitled “The era of the social capital. Forgotten achievements of Warsaw enterprises 1864-1939” and published at the leading Polish por...

Although we tend to primarily concentrate on the voluntary sector and the social economy to track social innovation, we have always emphasised that it can and does also occur in the sector of priva...

On 19-20 May 2014, the European Commission’s DG Research and DG Employment organized a potentially ground-breaking conference on “social policy innovation”. A mixed audience of ov...

As part of our Tepsie work on spreading social innovation, we have completed a series of case studies examining the growth of individual innovations. In one of these case studies we looked in detai...

This guest post from SPRU Senior Lecturer Adrian Smith explores the relationship between concepts of grassroots innovation and truly democratic innovation. This post is based on Adrian's contri...

March saw the first conference of the Accelerator Assembly Network at the BBVA Innovation Center, in Madrid. Accelerator programmes provide training and mentoring for cohorts of businesses, aiming ...

When people discuss social innovations, they often focus on the successful cases which have spread far and wide. But to what extent does this reflect the reality of social innovation? And what does...

What’s the link between social innovation, systemic change and societal transformation? This blog has been written by Julie Simon. Over the course of the two days of the Social Frontiers conf...

At the beginning of November, we have participated in the “Hello Impact” event which took place in Athens, Greece. This event was the second step towards the launch of the Impact Hub At...

Last month I attended an event at The RSA: “Are Service Users The Key To Systems Change?” This featured Dr. Charlie Alcock of MAC-UK in conversation with Chris Wright of Catch-22 and Cl...

A busy few weeks for the Tepsie team means it is already a month since I attended the 5th International Social Innovation Research Conference, this year hosted at the Saïd Business School at t...

The Commission in their effort to enhance the visibility of successful Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities and to disseminate good practices, launched the European CSR Award Scheme for...

Aaron Hurst, founder and president of the Taproot Foundation has written a useful series of blogs for the Stanford Social Innovation Review on scaling of non-profits. He argues that although there ...