At Make A Dream Publishing Ltd., while investigating what underpins the successful creation of a social enterprise, we came across the 224-page e-book Social Innovator Series: Ways to Design, Develop and Grow Social Innovation.
This inspired us to create a workshop and a subsequent webinar based on the steps required to create a social enterprise.
Our director Graham Nicholls – who has been involved in European Funded projects since 2004, and who has raised over €3,000,000 for organisations across Europe – first presented the following model to a Social Firms Europe CEFEC international conference held in Corfu in September 2013.
Entitled Social Entrepreneurship Today: Grasping the Challenges and the Opportunities, the Social Innovator series identified 6 key stages in social innovation:
- Prompts: Frame the challenges differently to tackle the root cause and go beyond the symptoms. Mobilise belief that a course of action is possible, and that people are best suited to solve their own problems.
- Proposals And Solutions: Share knowledge and promote ideas from a variety of sources. Utilise networking (particularly with sources from other cultures and countries) to gain valuable new input.
- Prototypes And Pilot Projects: Assess the available finances and resources. Seek feedback and evaluations.
- Sustaining: Develop a clear idea of how the project will generate income to cover costs; will a public or private body pay for what is on offer, for example?
- Scaling And Diffusion: Analyse how to adapt to different areas, and how to share the innovations developed by the project so they’re not kept private.
- Systemic Change: How to spread the innovations arising from the project which impact and radically change the fundamental systems on which we depend (e.g. healthcare, housing, learning, training). Systemic innovation is different from innovation in products and services.
Here is a case study of how this process works at each stage: