The spring edition of CARE’s Impact Magazine is out and all about Scale x Design!
Take a look at this special issue, which features an in-depth look at the Scale x Design Accelerator & Challenge, Cohort 1 spotlights, Chrysalis – the parent of both our Different Cup of Tea and Broadening gender teams, as well as other stories of Innovation at CARE.
Click the cover to read the new issue:
We’re pleased to introduce Amani Institute, whose mission it is to “develop professionals who create social impact!” We are partnering with Amani to implement the upcoming Intrapreneurship Training session at the Scale X Design Accelerator Boot camp in Atlanta next month. This training will give our teams the skills to act like an entrepreneur and to fully integrate the innovative approaches they’re learning in the Accelerator into every aspect of their work at CARE.
Here’s how Amani Institute describes intrapreneurship: “We believe that there is a critical role for people who prefer to work inside an organization to make an impact – what is now being called an “intrapreneur.” Not everyone needs to launch a new company. Just as important as entrepreneurs are the leaders and managers who help the organization grow and fulfill its potential to solve social problems and improve the world.”
Amani Institue has worked with a wide range of NGOs, social enterprises, private companies and foundations to increase their capacity for social innovation. “Social innovation is a mindset and a process that can be taught, learned and reinforced with practice… [Organizations should] ensure they are building their staff’s innovation capability by offering access to training.”1 This encapsulates the Amani Institute’s work and we are thrilled to have them on board for what is stacking up to be an amazing week of intensive learning! Learn more about Amani Institute’s work here.
1 https://www.bond.org.uk/resources/an-introduction-to-social-innovation-for-ngos
The pinnacle of CARE’s first-of-its-kind Accelerator, the Scale X Design Challenge will bring together social entrepreneurs, investors, corporate executives and development practitioners to collaborate and celebrate CARE’s most promising and proven programs to eradicate global poverty and combat social injustice. Converging in New York City on January 26, 2017, Challenge attendees are invited to participate in social entrepreneurship and innovation workshops that culminate in a final festive evening where teams from the first cohort of the Accelerator will pitch their innovative ideas—and their vision for scale—to a panel of expert judges who will select three winners and award them each a $150,000 cash prize. With financial resources and the agility to implement their programs on a global scale, these teams will lead the way with shared intelligence, a unified vision and a singular focus to empower millions of people and inspire lasting change.
Register now by clicking on the Save the Date below!
Thursday, January 26, 201 7
In our Design for Scale lab, design question #3 asks us: “What’s our optimal fidelity for scale?”
What is fidelity? Very simply, it’s the degree of exactness with which something is copied and reproduced.
Why is it important?
Well, in some fields it’s both easy and critical that that the fidelity of an intervention is high. For example, when you’re sick and you take a pill you’re taking the same pill that others who share your diagnosis will take. The dose, timing and other instructions that you receive must be followed in order to get positive results.
Designing an intervention that should be replicated with high fidelity is both necessary and relatively straightforward for many fields. What about development? As we scale, we know that we can’t simply take our exact model and apply it to new geographies, new demographics and new sectors. We know that it won’t work if we don’t adapt.
Conversely, adapt too much or let the model be watered down and we may not be able to get them same positive impact we did in our pilot or the early stages of our programs.
David Butler, VP for Innovation at Coca-Cola, helps one of the world’s largest companies design for scale using a simple framework of determining what elements are “fixed” and which are “flexible.”
To break it down for us, he uses the analogy of lego bricks. The whole video is great, but for the part on legos start at the 8 minute, 30 second mark and end at 13 minutes, 50 seconds.
Could any sector possibly have more buzzwords, jargon and even made up words than the global development sector? Sometimes it seems that the field of innovation is trying to give us a run for our money! What happens when you work in both spaces? Hopefully you have a sense of humor to keep you sane.
The folks at USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures challenged the humorists at the JadedAid (makers of the “scalable crowdsourced development tool – JadedAid: A card game to save humanitarians”) to submit a proposal. JadedAid crowdsourced their proposal (really, is that any different from how we write them?) and USAID sent them their determination letter with lightning speed. Hilarity ensues.
If you could use a laugh today, check out the full post here!
Source: That Time We Asked USAID for $1 Million in JadedAid Funding… – JadedAid
Development projects often have an end goal of perhaps being picked up by the local government. Or, perhaps the goal is for activities to be sustained by the local community. Historically, much of our focus was placed on sustaining the results of a particular project, but not necessarily the scalability of our work.
So two simple but often unasked questions, then, are: if this model goes to scale (nationally or globally), who will replicate it and who will pay for that replication?
In our lab on Designing for Scale, we’re thinking about five key design questions. Question #2 is “Who is the doer and who is the payer at scale?” – a question inspired by the Mulago Foundation and a fantastically simple article published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
The question is particularly powerful, because there are actually very few options. Who might be the “doer?” You have three options:
And while it might seem that there’s a dizzying array of confusing funding sources for our “payers,” which are NGOs, government or business, at the end of the day, there are really only three sources of funding:
Why is this design question helpful? Sometimes we have an idea of the doer and the payer from the beginning, but often we’re very narrowly focused on “proving” the efficacy of the innovation first and worrying about scale later.
Why do we need to determine this from the beginning?
Knowing who we think is eventually going to adapt and replicate our model will help us design for the user. When we think about going to scale, our user actually becomes the organization or individual who will actually be doing the scaling. Will it be an NGO worker, a government staff person or an entrepreneur who will be replicating our model? We need to know that information so we design with them in mind.
Depending on who we expect to replicate, we can consider from the beginning what type of evidence we’d like to generate. Historically, we’ve been more focused on proving impact. However, if we identify that we want to be scaling through government or the private sector, evidence around cost-effectiveness or profitability may be more critical to understand how feasible it is to scale the innovation.
Finally, we need to have the relevant stakeholders for scale with us from the beginning. If we aren’t clear up front on our goal for scale, how do we know if we’ve identified and are working with the right stakeholders?
