This report 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. The point of departure for this report was In and Out of Sync, a NESTA publication from 2007. They have built on the ideas in that document, drawn on wider research on scaling and interviewed social innovators. The interviews have been written up as ‘scaling stories’, included in full in the report. In this report it is argued that social innovators who are attempting to scale could benefit from developing deliberate strategies for doing so. Developing a scaling strategy involves establishing why, what and how you’re going to scale. This has been broken down into four stages:
Scale can be achieved in many ways. One challenge for social innovators is to think about how they ‘frame’ their innovation in order to scale it up. Social innovations can be framed as programmes, services, products, organisational models – or more subtly, as ways of working, principles or ideas.
[Extracted from Executive Summary].
Gabriel, Madeleine (2014) Making it big : strategies for scaling social innovations, London, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA).
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