Chapter 2: Scaling Social Innovation

The most difficult challenges in today’s world, such as poverty, education, climate change, health care, income inequality, etc., are complex and laden with dynamic social interactivity. These are problems that involve solutions on a grand scale which require national and international attention to successfully address. Too often, however, these issues are approached with individual programmatic solutions that are insufficient to tackle these issues at the scale at which they exist. Our goal should rather be to enhance the scope and complexity of our perspective and engage multiple stakeholders to craft solutions that are comprehensive enough, and possess sufficient resources and ideas, to adequately address these grand challenges. Conventional discussions of innovation tend to focus on its products – a new technology, new service outcome, new delivery model, etc. However, innovation is as much about process as it is about the result. Rather than moments of discovery, luck, or brilliance, establishing a culture of innovation is what drives continual and lasting change. This is particularly true for social innovation where advancements and new ideas must simultaneously meet social needs as well as create new relationships in order to be successful.