Innovation and Scaling for Impact forces us to reassess how social sector organizations create value. Drawing on a decade of research, Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair transcend widely held misconceptions, getting to the core of what a sound impact strategy entails in the nonprofit world. They reveal an overlooked nexus between investments that might not pan out (innovation) and expansion based on existing strengths (scaling). In the process, it becomes clear that managing this tension is a difficult balancing act that fundamentally defines an organization and its impact.
The authors examine innovation pathologies that can derail organizations by thwarting their efforts to juggle these imperatives. Then, through four rich case studies, they detail innovation archetypes that effectively sidestep these pathologies and blend innovation with scaling. Readers will come away with conceptual models to drive progress in the social sector and tools for defining the future of their organizations.
This case describes the evolution of a community affairs initiative called the India Programme, run by the Zurich Financial Services (UKISA) Community Trust. ZFS (UKISA) is UK-based and specialises in general insurance and life assurance. It is part of the Zurich Financial Services group of companies, headquartered in Switzerland, and was formed in 2000 after the completion of the merger between Zurich Insurance of Switzerland and the UK-based insurance operations of BAT Industries - Allied Dunbar and Eagle Star. The case explores how an initiative with a social objective (the India Programme) comes into being within a large organisation and is subsequently developed. It describes how external events such as the merger affect the development of the programme and offers the potential to explore how the mechanics of the initiative can be changed to fit with company strategy. The case also examines how a company can create economic value through a social initiative and how to manage the twin objectives of social value creation and economic value creation over the longer term. As an example of an initiative that combines social and economic value creation, the case can be used to illustrate a range of issues within the fields of corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship and community affairs management. It also deals with interesting human resources and talent development issues.
Debates about how to respond to climate change have largely focused on the difficulties in agreeing on national targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By assuming that the main obstacle to emissions reduction lies in the inability to reach agreement internationally, the current debate underplays the challenges of building the state capacity that will be needed to ensure mitigation takes place. The implementation of mitigation strategies is far from straightforward. It requires careful balancing of competing priorities and deliberate strategies to bring different interest groups on board. We analyze the way this balancing act has been carried out in promoting energy efficiency measures in China and India. The balancing act has been done differently as each country has tailored its approach to the specific context of competing priorities and differing state capacity. We encapsulate these differences by referring to China’s approach as “state-signaling” and India’s approach as a “market-plus” approach. China’s approach is more explicitly statist than India’s, but in both countries, the state plays a central role in building the support base for its policies through processes that we describe as the bundling of policies and interests. These bundling strategies are used to help build informal coalitions in favor of energy efficiency measures.
The last decade has seen a surging demand for biofuels in the wake of increasing oil prices and rising environmental concerns. The most common biofuel is bio-ethanol accounting for more than 90% of total biofuel usage. It is increasingly produced from sugar cane making cane a strategic crop for biofuels. Given the growing demand for “green” fuels, bio-ethanol production has been supported by energy policies in the past decade, which have consequently been accused of contributing to the global trend of rising food prices and thus jeopardising food security. However, while biofuel policies are an important driver, prices as much as food security will ultimately be determined by supply constraints of strategic crops. This paper hence investigates drivers of and constraints to sugar cane production in (the) People’s Republic of China and India and shows that supply side constraints vary significantly in the two countries. (the) PRC and India both face serious limitations with regard to suitable available land for the further expansion of sugar cane production. Equally they are both faced with challenges to increasing yield output per hectare, albeit different ones. With regard to productivity, (the) PRC achieved 2.7% annual yield growth since 1997, while India has seen yield decreases of −0.1% p.a. over the same period. The authors conclude that cane used as a feedstock to meet the rising energy demand will come at the expense of converting fertile land for non-food purposes.