-
Growth on Your Own Terms: Three Tips for Scaling Your Social Enterprise – Without Selling Your Soul to Investors
Every development-focused organization faces the challenges of funding, but the issue is especially acute for social entrepreneurs seeking to scale. Funding an expansion often means incorporating the opinions and vision of investors – some of whom may not be aligned with the enterprise’s mission or business plan. Sam Alhadeff at Finding Impact shares some essential advice on how to acquire funding that lets you scale without selling out, based on conversations with several prominent social entrepreneurs.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
-
Viewpoint: How To Successfully Scale Up While Keeping In Touch
For many social entrepreneurs, scaling their work to an international stage would fulfill a lifelong goal. Yet, in the process of scaling and operating a global social enterprise, it can be easy to lose sight of operations on the ground, with potentially disastrous consequences.
- Categories
- Finance
-
The Social Innovation Paradox: Why it’s Hard to be Both Innovative and Scalable
Feeling good about using an organic cotton tote bag for groceries, instead of disposable plastic bags? Research suggests that you'll need to use it 20,000 times to offset the high water costs of growing the cotton. That's just one example of the unseen web of impacts behind seemingly positive interventions, says Bright Simons, president of mPedigree. Interventions with more concrete impacts are more often penalized for their negative side effects, he says – but they're also more likely to scale. Simons explores the resulting paradox: The most scalable interventions become risk-averse, sacrificing innovation for growth.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Impact Assessment
-
Adapt or Die: Accelerating Growth Amid a Rapidly Changing Energy Landscape
The clean cooking sector has made incredible strides in the past decade, with bilateral organizations and the development community working together to create standardized environmental impact goals. Now the industry is facing a new set of scaling challenges, say Jessica Alderman and Ron Bills of Envirofit International. The two share advice for enterprises seeking to level up, including how to avoid mission creep.
- Categories
- Energy
-
A stumbling block to growth trips up companies trying to do good
When established social enterprises do secure funding to support their growth it is not necessarily the end to their woes.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
-
Critics: Give Development Impact Bonds a Chance to Learn to Walk Before They Run
Brian Boland, co-founder of The Delta Fund - a donor-advised fund focused on poverty alleviation and justice reform - pushes back on a recent critique of development impact bonds. That critique, published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by Kevin Starr, took DIBs to task for high costs and questioned whether the investor returns are justifiable. Boland argues that DIBs are in their infancy, investors are already learning a lot from early pilots, and any pioneering new system requires time before it can scale.
- Categories
- Investing
-
How to Help Social Enterprises Scale: New Research Suggests it’s Not Just About Financial Capital
For businesses that need to scale, human capital support can provide long-lasting benefits. But Mark Horoszowski, co-founder and CEO at MovingWorlds.org, says that in spite of the value of investing in the people behind the enterprises, initiatives for capacity building, coaching and consulting largely go underfunded. Horoszowski explores findings from a first-of-its-kind report that show the power of human capital, and discusses three paths for building talent in the sector.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Investing
-
Three Ways Inclusive Businesses Can Become More Customer-Centric
In any successful business, the customer always comes first. However, impact-focused enterprises often paint customers at the base of the pyramid with wide brush strokes, overlooking nuances in culture, location and literacy. Christian Jahn, Executive Director of the Inclusive Business Action Network, understands the desire to "help" poor people – but notes well-intended social entrepreneurs risk ignoring what their customers really want. Instead, Jahn recommends businesses develop a holistic view of customer needs, viewing them through a realistic lens for more meaningful impact.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
Parent Organization
