This report is about how social innovations spread and grow. It aims to provide a theoretically and empirically grounded guide for the many people involved in social innovation: innovators, founders, policy-makers and commissioners. It draws on a growing body of research on patterns of growth, and distils its conclusions into a guide to help direct scarce resources more effectively to maximize social impact.
To validate and extend the existing literature, we undertook eleven case studies of social innovations. Although their patterns of growth vary in detail, they highlight four necessary conditions for putting innovative products, services and models into practice sustainably and on a large scale.