About Us
Launched in October, 2011, the Social Innovation Lab seeks to institutionalize innovation at BRAC and create an inclusive space where ideas are shared, nurtured, and translated into action. We look for ways to better align BRAC’s activities with its overall strategic priorities and better take advantage of emerging opportunities. While we do not implement any pilots on our own, we provide internal support to pilots when needed. Our long-term goal is to enhance BRAC’s overall capacity for managing internal innovation and foster organizational-wide dialogue and mobilization.
After a year of experimentation, we have settled on four key areas where we aim to add value:
1. Creating mechanisms to engage staff in problem solving
2. Supporting and incubating new cross-cutting initiatives
3. Serving as a “front door” for new ideas and potential partnerships
4. Driving a regional network around “doing while learning,” focused on scaling up social innovations (kicked off with the 1st Frugal Innovation Forum on March 30-31, 2013)
Doing while learning: Collaborative models for scaling innovation
It’s a long road from light-bulb moment, to an effective social innovation, to scale. Often organizations that demonstrate the successes on the ground lack the capability to scale up themselves or influence others, such as other organizations or the government, to take up the new practice. Nowhere are these issues more important to tackle immediately than in the Global South, where despite achievements in development, poverty remains vast and in need of large-scale action.
Scaling up requires a distinct skill set, relationships and political capital, that may be invisible but is a crucial success factor. Some organizations have built this capacity internally, and others have had great success by partnering with intermediary organizations. We can point to a few examples, but rigorous documentation and analysis of how they succeeded has not yet been undertaken.
Key questions of the project:
• What are the specific capacities and activities that enable a social innovation to go to scale?
• What are different strategies that organizations take to effectively achieve scale?
• How can ecosystems nurture and facilitate scale up of social innovation?
To answer these questions, we are calling on those who historically and currently are bucking the odds and succeeding at scale. Through a small network of organizations and academics, we will follow their activities in real time, collectively learn and reflect, and try to extract the common practices and drivers of success. From these, we will create tools for other practitioners to access in their own efforts to take social innovations to scale.
This project is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation from November 2012 – October 2014.
