Scale and Diffusion
Scaling Ecosystems, Not Organizations
Published August 20, 2009 @ 11:58AM PT
After 18 months of traveling, Shawn Rubin, a teacher from Providence, RI, and his wife Laura Westberg had seen the world. They had visited with NGOs, been a part of service learning in numerous countries, and most of all, had been inspired by two of the local social entrepreneurs they had met. As they returned home, they knew they had to stay involved.
This is how Longitude, a nonprofit that supports the work of developing world social entrepreneurs, was born. Shawn and Laura came back and began writing letters to friends and family, telling them about a school for secretarial work in Ghana providing opportunities for women that just weren't normally available, and about the work of a human rights advocate who would travel to Indian villages and let members of the lowest caste know about their rights.
In the four years since, Longitude has raised over $100,000 to support the work of these groups and has placed numerous volunteers abroad with them. It's run on an entirely volunteer basis, and has more or less remained focus on it's personal relationships with the two organizations that first inspired it's founding.
Recently, Longitude founder Shawn had a "15 Minutes of Fame" moment when he was awarded the Eli Segal Award at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service. The award is the highest honor an Americorps alum can receive, and as Rubin found himself in the green room filled with political and entertainment celebrities waiting to speak, he had the presence of mind to hand Arianna Huffington his business card, a move that resulted in an invitation to write a blog post responding to President Obama's trip to Ghana that appeared on the front page of the popular news site.
Longitude is a great organization that feels a lot like other, small great organizations I've run into. It was born of relationships developed in person with specific global organizations that had a lot going for them, but perhaps not access to resources to more fully achieve their mission. It's been focused not on creating a brand new, innovative model for social change, but instead on investing deeply in a particular set of relationships.
In some ways, this is the model that has led to the growth of international NGOs in recent years. International travelers meet incredible local projects, recognize the great things they're doing but begin to wonder if they could - with the help of friends and family - better meet some of the resource constraints that hold those local innovators back.
There are many potential downsides of this approach. International development work is a difficult and complicated field. People get degrees in the field for a reason. The best of intentions (and even the best of intentions combined with advanced degrees, it should be noted) often don't produce results, or worse, produce unintended harmful consequences.
Yet there is also something profoundly right about the idea of people helping people who they've been inspired by and developed a relationship with. Done right, this sort of international partnership can produce work that is much more community driven, and if isn't a solvent for all the root causes of global inequity, can be one of the best ways of addressing ongoing challenges.
I've had a complicated history with that sort of work. When I was first introduced to community based organizations and local NGOs around the world, my "problem-solving-centric" mind quickly began to think about specialization, efficiency, and other jargony academic concepts.
What I've come to appreciate is the simple notion that it takes all types. The community organization or local NGO can provide vital local knowledge and perspective too easily trampled by technocratic policy. Their international partner volunteers can provide basic lifelines for support, as well as validation and a sense of connection every bit as important as money. Together, these groups can help support, challenge, and customize the models of innovative social entrepreneurs.
But it takes a different sort of focus to maximize these sort of ecosystems than it does to scale the work of a single organization or model. One of the things that's so exciting to me about the internet is that the mass distribution of information can be leveraged to form better lateral connections and networks of these small by dynamic organizations to share best practices and lessons. I also think that taking the ecosystem view implicates the need for universities and governments, which can be vital to enabling the sort of conditions where small changemakers can thrive.
So when you look at a group like Longitude, think about the other groups you know like it and how you can best contribute. To learn more about them, visit their website or check out the video about their Ghana partner, PROFESA, below:
Photocredit: golongitude.org
The Democratization of End User Innovation
Published June 05, 2009 @ 06:49AM PT
Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson wrote an awesome post this morning called "Open Platforms and Innovation," in which he discusses Time magazine's cover story this week about Twitter.
The major take away from the article, in Fred's mind, is a shift in thinking about innovation. While evidence of innovation (or innovation capacity) is usually measured in patents and PhD's, there seems to be a disconnect between those numbers and the sort of consumer innovation that is becoming so seamlessly integrated with the modern internet.
Technology has reached a point where anyone can get involved with innovation. Patents and degrees matter a lot less. Imagining something and then coding it up is what its all about these days.
We are engaged in what Eric von Hippel calls "end user innovation" and it is a fundamental shift in the way society innovates. The Twitter founders are a perfect example. They built a simple tool to share short messages and it has become something entirely different.
Now clearly Fred is focused on the consumer internet, but there is evidence of this thesis all around. My friend Alex at NetSquared posted an awesome interview with Appfrica Founder Jon Gosier. Talking about the genesis for the idea:
So at Barcamp Kampala (or Campala as we called it), about 80 to 100 hungry software developers showed up. They had never done anything like it before. They were mostly students but there were also CEOs, administrators, and leaders from the industry (like Joseph Mucheru from Google East Africa). Unlike most events here, everyone was an equal, it didn't matter if you were a student or millionaire, everyone had equal control. That seemd to really resonate. One of the things the crowd kept mentioning was that there was a lack of mentors and access to capital for software developers. I decided to start Appfrica Labs out of those discussions.
Appfrica just saw the first investment in one of it's developer's companies, Status.ug.
The fascinating thing is that while the tech world has some unique circumstances, it's impact is enabling the democratization of innovation elsewhere, as well. For example, the rural clinics who are beginning to use FrontlineSMS:Medic aren't necessarily hacking the software, but they are building use cases that can be shared across their network and diffuse innovative practical applications.
This is extremely powerful stuff.
Foundation Support for the "Diffusion" Model of Scale
Published April 22, 2009 @ 12:57PM PT
This post is a re-print of a comment by Muhammad Al-Tauhidi on the post "Scale vs. Diffusion Redux". It's so thoughtful it deserved a re-print.
To your point: "why would funders - such as foundations - who are ostensibly primarily concerned with the social return on investment balk at the diffusion model if it is better suited to the innovation which they hope to spread?"
As you state, I don't know that foundations would necessarily balk at funding innovations built to diffuse per se, other than the fact that foundations are probably more comfortable funding "organizations" than funding "innovations" in the first place. There are at least two reasons why this is the case.
First, foundations (and private capital) are more likely to fund proven successes - either (A) people and teams with a track record of success (B) organizations that have already achieved some level of success with their current endeavor and need funding in order to grow (i.e. scale). If you spend any time talking to traditional VCs, they will be quick to tell you that they fund teams rather than ideas. Although foundations may be less explicit, I imagine they are often looking for the same thing (a quick look at the criteria Ashoka Fellows of Skoll Foundations Awards confirms this).
Second, and I think this is the really the key issue, is that it is hard to measure the impact of dollars spent on enterprises whose impact comes primarily through diffusion rather than proprietary growth. Foundations, as much as entrepreneurs, want to be able to "take credit" for their success. Ego aside, there are many altruistic reasons for taking credit for success (especially given the point just made about funders being more likely to support entrepreneurs/organizations who have already proven themselves to be successful). What I am getting at here is that funders are interested in backing people/teams/organizations that are likely to succeed, rather than support ideas (even if widely replicable outside the organization) at organizations that are likely to fail because it is much easier to demonstrate their impact at the former.
From the perspective of pitching foundations (as opposed to private capital) for funding for diffusive organizations, what I think is needed are ways to clearly articulate and measure impact in ways that are proprietary, even if they do not involve than proprietary "growth" per se. In other words, the organization needs to be able to show how, and to what extent, it is directly responsible for diffusing the innovation. Sean's Steal this Idea! blogpost compares Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) and Homeboy Industries. Sean describes how NFP replicated its program all over the country and "now offers services in 28 states and have over 16,000 families enrolled in their program." In comparison, Homeboy Industries has refused requests to replicate its gang intervention program from Los Angeles to other cities, but, according to Sean: "they do act as a model for other programs and help other programs get started."
Just looking at Sean's own descriptions of the two programs betrays the problem: NFP gets credit for over 16,000 enrolled families while Homeboy Industries' claims only the rather vague impact of "helping other programs get started." With foundations and NPOs focusing more and more on impact and accountability I think the reality is that most funders would prefer to contribute their scarce resources to the NFPs of the world rather than Homeboy Industries for just this reason.
Instead, the onus will be on the entrepreneurs to think about how to approach diffusion in a way that is directed and measurable rather than the sort of vague, serendipitous diffusion that Sean describes for Homeboy Industries. For instance, Homeboy could create a standard curriculum or standardize other components of its program in a way that could be copied and reused by other upstart programs in other cities. With just a little work, Homeboy could track the number of organizations and students using their curriculum and could claim, for example, the "16,000 former gang members who have been trained for new jobs using their curriculum in 28 cities." This certainly helps a potential funder more fully appreciate how the organization can achieve a large "footprint" even without achieving proprietary scale. I think it will remain up to the entrepreneur to think proactively about how to design organizations for such "purposeful" diffusion and how to effectively measure the organization's diffusive impact.
Scale vs. Diffusion Redux
Published April 20, 2009 @ 06:29AM PT
(via BusinessWeek)
Last week, I wrote a post suggesting that certain social innovations are better served if we think about their growth as diffusion across a network rather than scaling production within a particular institution. At the same time, Sean at Tactical Philanthropy wrote a similarly themed post called "Steal This Idea!"
The posts clearly hit a nerve. It seems that many in this world are thinking hard and potentially thinking different about "scale" and are up for a little critical re-evaluation. With this post, I want to highlight just a few of the comments and conversations:
Steal This Idea!: Sean makes the point that because knowledge is valued differently in the social sector, the originator of a good idea for changing the world doesn't need to "own" it's application to reap it's benefit.
The Business Model of Change is Important: Tony Wang writes that whether the model of growth looks more like traditional scale or networked diffusion, understanding and actively cultivating that model is an essential part of the entrepreneurial process.
Comment Theme #1 - Finally, "Scale" Isn't Sacrosanct: A variety of commenters - notably Nick from the School for Social Entrepreneurs and Ken from FrontlineSMS were excited to see real active discussion that could impact our sometimes unwavering fealty to the gospel of scale.
Comment Theme #2 - Affirmation of Local Context: Another big theme was the notion that diffusion necessarily gives local context a stronger hand in adapting an innovation to meet a particular and discreet set of needs.
Comment Theme #3 - Mind Shift, Not Resource Increase: There was a lot of agreement that foundations still had a potentially vital role fostering the ecosystems in which innovation could diffuse across networks, and that a mindset shift was more important than any sort of resource increase.
Comment Theme #4 - Institutional Scale Still Matters: A final point was that the "diffusion" mindset doesn't entirely supplant our notion of scale as much as supplements it. There are still certain types of social sector products and services where the economies of scale that come from expansion of a particular institution or organization really matter.
The Daily Entrepreneur: Resources, Scale, and 99%
Published April 16, 2009 @ 08:17PM PT
Social Entrepreneurship: Resources for 'Patient' Capital: A short but useful list of funds for blended value entrepreneurs of all stripes.
The Business Model of Change is Important: Tony Wang adds to the conversation of Scale vs. Diffusion by imploring entrepreneurs to think about the model of scale they want to pursue as fundamental to their vision.
Five rules for getting your ideas off the ground: VentureBeat writes about tips from the Behance-sponsored 99% conference for creative innovators going on right now.
