IMPACT START-UPS
Design your solution for maximum impact
Do you have limited time and funding and need to test if you’re moving in the right direction?
Do you want to ensure that your solution is appropriate, effective and scalable?
We can help you structure and carry out rapid design research to understand the problem space, root causes and user groups. For innovations at the earlier stages, we can facilitate ideation and prototyping sprints with your team and stakeholders to create and test rough ideas rapidly.
Having worked with hundreds of innovation teams, we have seen the difference it makes to design for scale from the outset. We can help you think about what scaling means for you and how you can build and test your business model with the long-term scaling goal front and centre.
Inclusive innovation
We draw on a belief - supported by evidence from actors such as MIT D-Lab - that participatory innovation processes driven by a high degree of local or community leadership, and with a strong focus on inclusion, are more likely to be effective and scalable.
We can help you explore at any stage of your innovation process how to balance highly participatory processes with the need for specialist technical knowledge.
Build a powerful scaling strategy
Do you want to grow the impact of your innovation in an exponential, rather than slow and linear, way?
Do you want to explore and test which business models may be a good fit for your innovation to ensure financial sustainability and growth?
Are you looking for help exploring and securing funding and partnerships to support your scaling plans?
Once you have proven the effectiveness of your core innovation, you can begin to consider what possible ‘endgames’ might look like: what is the right scale at which your innovation can address the problem and what is the model for delivery and income sources?
We can help you review, prioritise and test possible scaling pathways, ensuring that you scale in a smart and efficient way that balances financial sustainability with your intended social and environmental impact.
Building on many years’ experience designing innovation funding and collaborating with philanthropy, funds, and bilateral donors, we can also help you map and prioritise funding sources to support you at every stage of your scaling journey.
What does it mean to scale?
Many social innovators want to scale their impact—whether to the entire local community, across the whole country, or in all relevant contexts worldwide—to ensure that as many people as possible benefit from the solution they have developed.
However, not all novel solutions are made for scaling ‘out’ (increasing reach): some are contextually specific and might instead look at how they can scale ‘deep’ by changing values, behaviours and practice in the given setting to achieve deeply embedded and sustainable change. This could, for example, include work to ensure that the impact endures through several generations.
Create an evidence strategy that will get you noticed
Are you caught in a cycle of collecting huge amounts of evidence without seeing the benefits of it?
Do you have a rich bank of data but are not quite sure how to use it?
Are you frustrated with constantly being told that your innovation has potential but just needs a bit more evidence before stakeholders are ready to adopt, buy or fund it?
Successful innovators often have in common the ability to to run test-and-pivot cycles rapidly with an adaptive learning mindset embedded across the team. The allows for quick evolution and improvement of a new solution, but in many social impact contexts this agile approach must be carefully balanced against the risk of doing harm to the people you are working with. We can help you plan your testing, including how to trial new solutions and collect performance data in an ethical, responsible way.
Growing and scaling an innovation requires not just the technical skills to design and test a new solution—teams must have a long-term strategy for who they need to influence to succeed. This could be operational partners, customers, funders or investors, but what they all have in common is that they require evidence that your solution is better.
We can help you identify your key evidence users, explore what types of evidence they need, build the strategy and partnerships to collect this evidence with you, and design an influencing and advocacy plan to ensure that your evidence reaches the right people and tells a compelling story.
Theory of Change as a core tool
When building an evidence strategy, we will often start with reviewing or creating a Theory of Change. A Theory of Change in itself can be an effective strategy and fundraising tool, and we love facilitating team Theory of Change workshops, which often surface important questions and decisions that have been holding back the organisation or programme.
We can then map which outcomes are priorities to measure and which causal links are key to prove; review how existing internal and external data contributes to this; and design a research plan to address remaining gaps.
