SCALING
What Is It?
Scaling considers how you move from an experimental prototype, designed to be quick, cheap, and low-fidelity and into implementing promising solutions to have much broader impact.
Many promising prototypes or pilots stay at that small, localized stage of development and never grow to realise their full potential. Scaling considers the strategy, pathways and mechanisms to take innovations to their next level.
Riddell + Moore, 2017 and Tulloch, 2019
How Is It Used?
How do you know when you’ve found a promising solution that is ready to scale? What kind of scaling is most appropriate for your solution at its’ stage of development? How might it achieve the greatest impact? Consider different types of scaling helps you to consider these questions, and more, as you build and implement strategy to grow the impacts of promising social innovations.
Scaling out = replicating in multiple places
Scaling up = into systems and structures
Scaling deep = into culture and mindsets
A later iteration of this literature included two additional types of scaling:
Scaling scree = scaling out while adapting to each new context
Scaling infrastructure = building social research and development infrastructure and capacities
More Info
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Article: Lifecycle of Emergence: Using Emergence to take Social Innovation to Scale (Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze
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Paper: Scaling Social Innovations
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Blog Series: Problematizing Scale within the Social Sector
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Book: Impact: Six Patterns to Spread Your Social Innovation (Etmanski)