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Scaling Up for Social Impact
Take a learning break—explore powerful ways to scale up your organization's social impact.
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Achieving scale necessitates new tools incorporating concepts such as collaborative innovation, networking, open sourcing, multi-stakeholder strategies, and approaches that come from sectors other than our own, including the business world.
- Technologies for Scaling Up Collaboration with Beryl Levinger – March 4, 2008
- Going Viral: Spreading Big Ideas through Networks with Claudia Liebler – March 20, 2008
- How Innovation Happens with Evan Bloom – April 24, 2008
- Designing for Scale with Kim Alter – September 25, 2008
- Higher Impact: The Hidden Power of Value Chains with Evan Bloom – October 16, 2008
Each workshop will be supported by the CBSG team.
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See below for workshop descriptions. Click here for more information on the facilitators.
Technologies for Scaling Up Collaboration
with Beryl Levinger – March 4, 2008
New collaborative technologies can help development practitioners at every stage of the scale-up journey. Our workshop is designed to give participants the opportunity to play in a technology sandbox. Attendees will gain first-hand experience in using a powerful set of digital tools and Web 2.0 applications. The objective of this experimentation is to provide participants with free or low-cost resources that can support the launch of “sticky” innovations. Participants will apply a framework for choosing and using the right tool for every aspect of the scale-up process. Please bring a laptop to the workshop. |
Going Viral: Spreading Big Ideas through Networks
with Claudia Liebler – March 20, 2008
Can big ideas become as contagious as a virus? In this workshop we will explore promising theories about how to take successful social development initiatives and turn them into a positive epidemic through networks. Participants will take a dive into a raging debate about how ideas spread through networks. We will look at recent research, as well as multiple examples of scale-up from the development and business sectors, to better understand how big ideas spread through social networks. Participants will learn about social network analysis and then experiment with Inflow software, a powerful network analysis application, which can be used to "weave" networks into human systems for scaling up social impact. |
How Innovation Happens with Evan Bloom – April 24, 2008
What is innovation? How do you generate, or even recognize it? In this session we will look at what innovation means for the social sector and unpack leading theories about "innovation systems", including Disruptive Technology and Open Collaboration theories. Our playground will be Pact's online Innovation Market. This online marketplace brings innovators together in a virtual forum to present solutions to key development challenges. Through the use of online decision markets, we will show participants how to tap crowd-wisdom to identify ideas with the greatest chance of generating significant, positive impact. In the process, we will create an open, questioning, and collaborative environment where divergent fields, cultures, and disciplines can meet and true innovation can seed and flourish.
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Designing for Scale with Kim Alter – September 25, 2008
This day-long interactive workshop will emphasize a strategic approach to planning and designing an organization or initiative to scale its impact. In doing so, the session will address critical issues of: why and when one should consider scaling, and how to define scale in the context of one's work. The workshop will examine a range of different scaling models- branching, organizational growth, franchise, advocacy, knowledge management, among others- best applications for various models, and the benefits and risks of each. As part of designing for scaling, participants will learn to assess their organization or initiative's strengths and weaknesses as they relate to scaling impact as well as to analyze strategic opportunities and constraints to scale. Finally, the session will lead participants through a Scaling Framework encompassing: purpose of scaling; implications of scaling strategy on operations, human resources and finance, mission and goals; sustainability of scaling model, and risks and special requirements to scale. The session will be comprised of lecture, video case studies, discussions, and application exercises.
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Higher Impact: The Hidden Power of Value Chains
with Evan Bloom – October 16, 2008
Even when scaling up social impact is a strategic imperative, organizations rarely examine their capacity to conceive, develop, roll out, and improve new offerings-- as a whole. By contrast, organizations that take a systemic view find they can pinpoint their weakest links and tailor innovation best practices appropriately to strengthen those links. In this session, participants will learn a framework to strengthen skills required to generate innovative ideas, convert them into viable offerings, and gain support from new constituents. This chain-based view of scale-up requires an understanding of value chains. Using this framework, participants will get an end-to-end view of their scale-up efforts. Bring a real scale-up challenge to this session and work with peer-colleagues to discover the hidden power of value chains. |
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