Spreading and Sustaining Innovation - Is it Time to Design “A New Normal”?
In the middle of writing my book, after analyzing the information I had gathered from the 18 Ashoka Fellows I interviewed, I started to ponder the topic of terminology around scale and sustainability and how they applied to the field of social entrepreneurship. From what I was hearing, it occurred to me that a new sensibility was coming into focus - one that made me consider “a new normal” to delineate these terms when applied to the work of social entrepreneurs.
I started by differentiating the work of the entrepreneurs and the sections of the book into 5 categories:
1 – Restructuring Industry Norms
2 – Changing Market Dynamics
3 – Using Market Forces to Create Social Value
4 – Advancing Full Citizenship
As I engrossed myself in analyzing the small details and nuances of the interviews and linking them together behaviorally, I found myself beginning to regard social entrepreneurs as a special type of instigator – an instigator of capacity - who liberates untapped potential and helps people find their way into new possibilities.
Social entrepreneurs intuitively realize that in order to sustain their innovation they must guarantee that each individual, each entity, each actor in their value chain of innovation fully believes that they themselves can manage and lead change – and influence change in the lives of those around them.
Looking at this grouping of 18 as an overall pattern, I envisioned the four qualities that they all share: purpose, passion, patterns and participation as a force field that thrusts innovation outward while magnetically pulling early adopters and agents of change inward.
That source of dynamism closes the gap between disparate values, beliefs, circumstances and goals of those involved in the chain. Along with entrepreneurial leadership, these changemakers, who work alongside the entrepreneur, help form the foundation of a new infrastructure that ripples outward creating progressions of influence that becomes far greater than anything the entrepreneurs could accomplish alone.
Collective action is catalyzed and in turn supports virtuous cycles of change that helps people and organizations step out of their own status quo. This leads to the establishment (hopefully the entrenched establishment) of the innovation and transforms the starting vision and preliminary implementation into a social institution.
So exactly what is the secret sauce of scale and sustainability as applied to social entrepreneurs? I have come to think that the ability of social entrepreneurs to scale their programs depends not only on their capacity to create movements that are strong enough to shake the foundations of poverty and inequality but ones that unequivocally rest on the strength of people’s participation included from the outset, in the initial vision.
They have learned that no individual agent (including themselves) or element determines the nature of a system – the organization of a system arises through the dynamic interaction among system’s agents and through the system’s interaction with other systems.
Social entrepreneurs build institutions around ideas and they understand that impact is not only measured in breadth but in depth as well. The virtuous cycles of change they create are flexible enough to converge, intertwine and ripple outward to create a newly developed eco-system that supports systemic change.
To borrow from Eric Glustrom’s post “A Synergistic Model of Scale,” the questions I now pose to myself and to you are:
1 – Can we “assess” the value of synergy and the synergistic impact of “rippling” social change?
2 - Do we need to design a new normal?
3 – Is it necessary to develop distinctive “assessments” (I am intentionally not using the word measurements) of impact that capture the unique and diverse work accomplished by the field?
4 - And if so, will they satisfy donors as a reflection of accomplishments and a good use of their funds?
Join Beverly Schwartz, author of Rippling: How Social Entrepreneurs Spread Innovation Throughout the World, in the conversation.
Several thoughts for this post are taken from the book. Copyright (c) 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
