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Top1. Introduction
In the last decade, the idea of social innovation emerged in political, social and academic spheres as a way to empower people and communities to address important social problems and challenges (e.g. social exclusion, climate change, mass urbanization, migration, rising inequality in income distribution, Avelino, Wittmayer, Pel, et al., 2019). Developing the idea that social innovation should be understood as a process rather than an output, Benneworth and Cunha (2015) proposed a non-linear model for the social innovation process, integrating three important elements: the progress of the innovation, the agency of the innovator, and the building up of the societal capacity. From a public policy design point of view, understanding this process that facilitates the emergence and dissemination of social innovations is the most important link in the “chain” to be addressed, namely its upscaling from an interesting occasional practice to something with agency to challenge the structural conditions that produce systematic inequality (Cunha & Benneworth, 2020).
However, academic literature has little to say about how local successful social innovation practices can be upscaled and applied in new and wider contexts thereby becoming important mechanisms for addressing social problems (Martins, Braga, Braga & Marisa, 2020). Upscaling is a process in which a social innovation becomes structural, capable of exerting agency to challenge systematic inequalities producing those problems (Marques, Morgan and Richardson, 2018), and this paper seeks to address that literature gap. The key challenge for the upscaling of a social innovation is depends upon the actions of a coalition of external partners over which the social entrepreneur will typically have limited leverage. Those innovations’ uptake does not depend on the social entrepreneur’s qualities, but those external partners’ own contexts. Analysing the quality of social innovations is thus rather difficult: we here draw on the metaphor that it is not enough to ‘build a better mousetrap’, because strong incumbency effects in all markets stop better products succeeding (David, 1985). We argue for more emphasis on encouraging and supporting social enterprises with upscaling potential, because they are contributing to addressing the necessary problems, rather than rewarding those with existing powerful stakeholder networks already able to achieve change.
In this paper, we argue that ‘ready-to-upscale’ social enterprises (this desirable class of social enterprises) have three criteria: (a) clearly produce a solution to an underlying problem, (b) activities from the social enterprise are clearly derived from underlying problem, and (c) those activities clearly connect forward to deliver consistent solutions. To do this, we apply a Theories of Change (ToC) approach to the social entrepreneurship concept, as a means of setting a criterion for ‘ready-to-upscale’. We ask the research question to what extent is it possible to discern theories of change being built into the business practices of nascent social enterprises in ways that lay foundations for their subsequent upscaling? We address this with a study of 6 Sri Lankan micro-social enterprises where we use this ToC Approach to trace impact stories. This provides a means to develop an abstract model of the ways that social entrepreneurship may create foundations for structural changes reducing systematic inequalities, and we propose several measures that social enterprise funders could use to better stimulate the emergence of ‘ready-to-upscale’ social enterprises.
The paper’s contribution is twofold. First, it contributes to the theoretical literature on social innovation by conceptualising the idea of upscaling of social innovations based on a forward looking perspective on the role that social entrepreneurship might play using a theory of change approach. Second, the study contributes to the empirical literature on social innovation providing insights regarding how grassroots social enterprises initiatives contribute to upscaling of social innovations using locally available resources whilst developing broader networks of collaborations in novel ways.