How Can You Tell If You are Ready to Scale?

GrowthEven the most successful social enterprises face challenges as they expand into new geographies, expand their product offerings, partner with others, or grow the size of their operations. Social enterprise growth often requires evaluation and evolution among multiple dimensions, including customer-facing criteria such as market size and product-market fit; operational and business model considerations such as unit economics, internal talent and culture, and technology; impact vision, pathways, and metrics; and much more.

To help address these challenges, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Global Development Lab has engaged CASE to develop and test a growth readiness assessment and coaching process with a subset of social enterprises that have received funding from the Development Innovation Ventures program.  The selected grantees are:

Over the next 18-months, CASE will leverage our expertise in scaling social impact and our experience supporting and learning from global social entrepreneurs through the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD) and Scaling Pathways.    Initially, CASE will develop and use diagnostic tools and a 360-degree assessment process to help these enterprises better understand their readiness for scaling the impact of their organization’s program, product, or principles.  Members of the enterprises’ leadership teams will then work with coaches to make progress on selected areas identified through the assessment.   CASE has selected We Scale Impact to help provide assessment and coaching services.

CASE looks forward to sharing our tools and learnings with the field over the next two years.