How Do You Scale Social Innovation Startups?
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Erica Kochi, the co-lead of UNICEF’s Innovation unit. Her team started UNICEF’s open source RapidSMS platform which has been adopted in developing countries worldwide. She co-teaches a class ”Design for Unicef” in NYU’s ITP Program, is a global partner of Stanford’s New Product Design Innovation course, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia University on leveraging technology and design to improve international development. She previously wrote on TechCrunch about how the future of mobile lies in the developing world. All views are her own. You can follow her on Twitter. You’re a social entrepreneur wanting to change the world, but are having a hard time scaling your promising idea and achieving lasting impact. In my job as UNICEF Innovation co-lead, I come across hundreds of promising and not so promising technology and social innovation startups every year. While this is an emerging space, many social innovation startups face similar challenges. In this piece I want to provide some practical advice for how social innovation startups can increase their chances of success. To frame this advice, let’s first take a look at what the terms scale and impact mean. Scale implies that your idea is reaching a large percentage of your target audience. For example, the mobile money transfer and microfinance service M-Pesa serves over 26 million people across East Africa who could not otherwise easily transfer money to relatives and pay businesses. Another example would be that during the 2011 drought across the Horn of Africa, UNICEF and partners provided access to safe drinking water for 3 million people. Impact implies that your product or service has a positive and transformative effect or prevents a negative effect on even the poorest parts of society. An example of this is Tostan’s work, which has led to over 6,000 communities in eight countries to abandon the harmful practice of female genital cutting. Another example is the effort by a multitude of partners to eliminate measles throughout the world. This effort has led to a 74 percent reduction of measles deaths in the past 10 years. The true skill of a social innovation startup is not just in choosing the right idea, but in using finding and working with the right partners, aligning with priorities and funding, and continuously delivering and communicating impact along the way. 1. Work with the right partners In the social space, there are
