A Design Tool-Box to Scale Social Innovations from one context to another

Abstract

In the last decades, more and more complex societal and environmental challenges are rising. Social Innovation is an emerging and promising framework to tackle complex global challenges at the local level of urban contexts. These projects are socially, culturally and contextually embedded and highly dependent on the local ecosystem of resources. Due to their reduced size and non-profit driven structure, social innovations lack financial resources and the needed capacity, hindering them from scaling and achieving a larger impact. Hence why these small-scale and hyper-localized projects often struggle to take root in new contexts. Design capabilities are exponentially considered a fundamental enabler of innovation processes (Scott, 2018), and recently the awareness toward design tools in supporting bottom-up, local innovations increased. Initiatives such as the Designscapes project are examples of a design-capability building program aiming to foster innovation through design by helping these small-scale urban initiatives to scale and achieve impact goals. Although design has great potential to enable innovation, the design process stops at the implementation stage, failing to provide innovators with the needed tools to achieve large-size impact. Therefore, the current project explores how design could support social innovations to scale and achieve impact by unfolding the scaling journeys of Designscapes initiatives. In addition to the research goal, understanding the scaling process of social innovations through design, the project aims to develop a framework/tool-kit enabling small-scale urban initiatives to overcome challenges and develop strategies to scale from one context to another. Several design elements have been used to carry research throughout an iterative double-diamond design process to respond to the project goals. Theoretical knowledge has been applied and used as an exploration mean to conduct empirical research within the practice of Designscapes initiatives. The research findings led to the development of the 'Scaling Framework,' which presents the crucial steps and criteria to scale social innovations. Even though scaling is a complex matter and one single solution to scale does not exist, network formation resulted, from research, being an effective strategy to scale. It allows social innovators to mobilize the resources necessary, align demand and supply, to have a desirable and viable solution implemented in the new context. However, to form networks and replicate the project from one context to another, these small-scale social initiatives have to overcome two main challenges, identified as the cognitive and context gap. Therefore, to overcome those challenges, Social Innovators will capture what to scale by acknowledging differences and similarities between the local context conditions, re-framing their value proposition to match the local resources and people's needs, and defining how to scale by articulating impact-driven strategies. The research outcomes have been turned into a 'Scaling Tool-Box' to make the scaling framework and process actionable and operational, hence useful for its intended users (social innovators). The final result of the project, 'a design tool-box to support Social Urban Innovators scaling from one context to another, facilitates small-scale social initiatives bridge the gaps and develop strategies to form local networks. In conclusion, scaling is like a learning process where social innovators have to learn What and How to adapt to the local context conditions. Because of the value of design in building capacity and functioning as a framework guiding a particular thinking process, independently from the domain or stage of application, design demonstrates being a relevant tool enabling innovation to scale. Furthermore, the final result still has opportunities for improvement, and future research is seen as necessary to expand the tools and outcomes beyond the initial steps of scaling. Indeed, the tools focus only on one part of the scaling process identified and defined through the (theoretical) framework. Moreover, because of the small-scale study conducted in this project, further exploration to validate the tool beyond its context scope (Designscapes initiatives) could help open up and generalise the results to a broader audience.