A key observer Emmanuel Dupont: Let’s scale up together!
Emmanuel Dupont, Head of scientific and strategic leadership, General commission for the equality of regions (Commissariat général à l’égalité des territoires)
"Let’s scale up together! (Ensemble, accélérons!)” is the title of a report of a working group that you ran jointly with Benoit Landeau from the general secretariat for the modernization of public action (secrétariat général pour la modernisation de l’action publique). The subtitle
"Providing support for innovators as they scale up" corresponds nicely to the theme of this newsletter, even though you've addressed it more broadly in terms of social and public innovation.
What are the findings and issues behind your thinking?
"By their very essence, social or public innovations are above all constructions derived from work the field, in contact with users. Platforms and networks supporting these local initiatives highlight the need to equip people who are able to transfer them from one region to another. Changing scale is not easy. In addition to communicating and sharing these initiatives, we need engineering to manage scaling".
What does a change of scale actually mean?
"We have identified two main aims and their objectives:
› Increasing the social impact of the project
› Increase the impact on each beneficiary
› Increase the number of beneficiaries per region
› Increase the number of regions,
to reach new beneficiaries
› Ensuring the survival or economic growth of the organization
› Sustain the economic model
› Increase the efficiency of the structure (economies of scale, productivity gains)
Six implementation models for the use of project leaders wanting to scale up, have been proposed:
› Intensification: doing better what we do already
› Diversification: doing something other than what we do already
› Dissemination or duplication by geographic deployment: doing more than what we do already
› Dissemination by making services available or fertilizing: getting others to what we do already
› Cooperation: doing things together to do more and better
› Merging: uniting to strengthen the project
To attain the objectives mentioned above, the operational methods are adapted and modified from out of the six identified.
The way we go about swarming, transfer/transposition, dissemination, etc., helping to strengthen and multiply the impact of innovations and initiatives, is very diverse and unique to each project.
In practice, it is common for several objectives to combine in a project. "
In your opinion, what is the role of public entities?
"The issue of scaling has mainly been dealt with up to now from the standpoint of social entrepreneurs. Public entities have a possible role at two levels: to support the dissemination of social innovations and to public deploy innovations within administrations.
In our report, we made 10 proposals to enhance the role of public entities in scaling up innovation”.
For more information: Consult the "Ensemble : accélérons!” report "(PDF)
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Source: ECLAIRA - Newsletter Number 5 / December 2016
Newsletter edited by CIRIDD with support from Région Auvergne - Rhône-Alpes
