This is a CTP of initiative: Impact Hub London King’s Cross (UK)
This CTP consists of the launch of the first IH Scaling programme in May 2015 (http://scaling.impacthub.net/). This programme lasted until May 2016 and therefore this CTP was considered to be ‘in the making’ at the time of the interviews.
The Scaling Programme is a programme to support social innovators/impact makers/social entrepreneurs to ‘scale’ (i.e. transfer/ replicate/ grow) their project/concept/business to other European countries. All across Europe, people work on similar issues without being able to scale beyond their local context. In the Scaling Programme, the initiatives are supported by coaches (Scaling Managers) via a tailor made programme. As outlined by the Legal director, “even within the EU, every country has its cultural differences, its legal differences. If you are a relatively small business and want to expand, it can be a nightmare where to start. An IH scheme like this is a place for you to go, and to meet people, to learn, get orientated, advice to start. So it is a sort of soft landing compared to working your way in the dark”. Eight Impact Hubs in Europe are involved in supporting the initiatives (next to IH King’s Cross, also Amsterdam, Athens, Bucharest, Madrid, Milano, Stockholm, Vienna and the Impact Hub Network). This first Scaling Programme lasts from May 2015 to May 2016. Each of the participating Hubs has a full time scaling manger. The programme is offered to businesses that want to scale to another country.
The Scaling Programme is a CTP for the IH KC as it is delivering on the purpose of the Impact Hub to be globally connected (or in this case, being connected at a European level) without losing the local roots. The legal director emphasizes that: “for me the Scaling Programme (…) is the most meaningful concrete demonstration so far of us delivering our purpose of being globally connecting or at least European connected, in a way that is helping social business to thrive”. Scaling was seen as an important objective of the Impact Hub and had always been present superficially. The arrival of the Scaling Programme has changed this: “this is, first for me, a systematic programme at scale where we are delivering the promise, not just randomly to one or two members in each Hub” (Legal director).
The Director of the Scaling Programme is also ‘Development Director’ at the IH KC and was the Impact Hub network coordinator of the BENISI project, an EU-funded project focusing on ‘scaling social innovation’. It consisted of a trans-European consortium of which the IH KC is a partner. Other partners include Diesis, Eurada, i-propeller, Impact Hub Network, IH Vienna, IH Stockholm, IH Bucharest, IH Amsterdam, IH Milan, Fondazione Cariplo, Pefondes and Oksigen Lab. This project aimed at scaling social innovation through building a European-wide network of incubators for social innovation. The project ran from May 2013 to April 2016.
Besides the IH KC, both the Scaling Programme and BENISI involve several other partners, including (individuals from) other Impact Hubs and other organisations in research and social innovation. Besides the formal partners in the Scaling Programme and BENISI project, the programme director also mentions cooperation with specific organisations such as the Cariplo Foundation (Italy), CRT Foundation (Italy), Stavros Niarchos Foundation (Greece) and JP Morgan & Chase Foundation , which are mentioned as major and forward looking philanthropic organisations in Europe, who helped to develop the Scaling Programme, mobilising their networks and gaining access to funding. These other partners as well as the EU (as funder of the BENISI project) were also relevant players in co-producing the Scaling Programme. As the legal director indicates, the BENISI project provided the “original seed funding” for some of the ideas underlying the Scaling Programme.
While the original seed funding for the Scaling Programme came from BENISI, the Impact Hub Network raised “private, philanthropic money from three foundations to fund the Scaling Programme” (Legal director). The IH KC website states the following philanthropic partners of the Scaling Programme: JP Morgan, Fondazione Cariplo, Stavros Niarchos Foundation and Fondazione CRT.
The Scaling Programme evolved from BENISI, while at the same time aiming to “go beyond BENISI”. The programme director of the Scaling Programme describes it as an “immediate response” to fill in the gaps of BENISI and “to deliver on the promises of BENISI”.
The complexity of the European landscape within which social entrepreneurs are acting was key to the development of the Scaling Programme: “And so, if you think about it, the insight is that even within the EU, every country has its cultural differences, its legal differences. If you are a relatively small business and want to expand, it can be a nightmare where to start. An IH scheme like this is a place for you to go, and to meet people, to learn, get orientation, advice to start. So it is a sort of soft landing compared to working your way in the dark” (Legal director).
Several other insights, from BENISI and beyond, informed the start of the Scaling Programme. According to the programme director, the BENISI project had responded to an EU call for “a network of incubators to scale, but that offered a partially distorted view of incubators, which normally focus on start-up businesses, while the IH Scaling programme focused on established ones that rarely need the services offered by incubators”. Part of the challenge of the Scaling Programme is to acknowledge the difference between incubation and scaling, and to recognise that scaling much more explicitly requires trans-nationalisation.
The Impact Hub is all about being locally rooted and globally connected and the IH Scaling programme explicitly aims for the European connection and scaling. However, in the local contexts the IH target groups cannot even afford to pay membership fees. As the legal director indicates “the people that we want to fill our Hubs with, cannot afford our memberships fees enough to make the hub viable. It’s the same here. The kids we would like to be helping - the young people - [they] are not going to be able to afford our membership fee. We need a philanthropic parchment to subsidize the programme so we can do it without [membership fees], and then of course later on, when they become successful, they can afford the fees. That is being another local side benefit of the Scaling programme; that we have enough profit organisation.”
Another contestation that informed the IH Scaling programme, was the discovery that start-ups, and the private sector more generally, are “not that eager to give things away (…) Social entrepreneurs do want to scale but they want to do so on their own terms” (Programme manager). A challenge for the Scaling Programme is how to deal with that.
Another tension refers to a tendency to place (too) much emphasis on existing conceptual frameworks for scaling (e.g. framework by Christine Weber from School of Governance, as adopted in BENISI). In practice, there was a “massive gap” between the intentions to scale and the capacity and organisational structure necessary to “learn to cope with the leapfrog that national and transnational scaling requires” (Programme manager).
There is a certain implicit anticipation in the discourse of the Impact Hub networks towards the birth of something like this Scaling Program. The very rebranding from ‘The Hub’ to ‘Impact Hub’ refers to an explicit wish to increase and ‘scale’ social impact. “The first ten years has been about establishing a mission and moving from being the Hub to Impact Hub. The next ten years will be about continuing to expand, deliver on being truly globally connected and locally rooted. And impact at scale. How do we scale impact, that’s what we are here for” (Legal director).
As the Scaling Programme was ongoing at time of the interview, there was anticipation at that moment regarding what it would deliver. The legal director points out that the Scaling Programme will have become successful once (1) it will become embedded, (2) become global and (3) if it would have a positive social contribution. Most importantly, it would be successful, if “it would have really promising social businesses to scale internationally”. The Scaling Programme is framed as a ‘prototype’. “In ten years we will look back and hopefully say we do all these things now and it all began with that. That was the first example. From a King’s Cross point of view, it has brought additional talent to our building in terms of both the members and the staff. It enhances our reputations as a social business community (…) It is giving us additional momentum, self-belief, (…) and really focused us on the mission”.
The programme director of the Scaling Programme indicates, “for the future we hope to become perfectly flexible, have actives nodes in different markets, organising entry session and trade missions”. The ambition is to have a continuous support on both the site of origin (regarding core purpose and capacity building) as well as on the site of destination and market penetration.
Another ambition is to help social entrepreneurs not only become ‘investment-ready’ (which is what many incubation programmes focus on) but also ‘contract-ready’, in order to be able to compete with private sector companies for public bids. This plays into the current trend that public services are being cut down, and that social entrepreneurs are “stepping into that void” (Programme director). But often, this does not result in the public service being adequately delivered. How to deal with that, and how to make social entrepreneurs 'contract-ready’?
One of the main ambitions of the Impact Hub is to ‘scale social innovation’ and increase positive social impact. As such, the IH Scaling Programme is at the core of its learning on how to achieve its mission. It is too early to draw overall learnings from the Scaling Programme, as it is in the middle of its first phase only and is currently evaluated by an independent entity: New Philantropy Capital . As the director of the Scaling Programme formulates it, the Scaling Programme is a “nascent ecosystem”.
What this CTP does, however, is to build on several insights that have been learned across the Impact Hub over the years, regarding its own limitations as well as challenges for the future. For instance, the programme director indicates that there is a “general misunderstanding towards networks and how they operate”, when it comes to facilitating and enabling transnational collaboration. To align eight Impact Hubs across eight different countries and to create an enabling infrastructure to help dozens of social entrepreneurs moving around those different countries, that is a challenge that requires more than a network. Hence, the Scaling Programme.
There also seems to be a healthy humbleness regarding the current market share of social enterprise. The director of the IH Scaling programme quotes figures from the British Council (Think Global, Trade Social report, 2015) showing how meagre the $10.6bn of global impact investment appear against the $530bn of remittances or $1.45tn of global FDI. “That is nothing… that is what a banker sneezes in a day”. That is not to discredit the purpose or relevance of social enterprise, but it does point to the challenge of ‘scaling’ social business as opposed to classic, mainstream business. One of the ambitions of the IH Scaling programme is to overcome that gap, amongst others by enabling social entrepreneurs to compete with classical business in public contract biddings.
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