Scaling Social Enterprises - A Theoretically Grounded Framework

Abstract

The authors develop a comprehensive scaling framework to improve understanding of the complex causalities and interdependencies of the various factors affecting the scalability of social impact. They define “scaling” and the taxonomy of replicability, adaptability, and transferability. Closely examining the entire literature on scaling of social enterprises and nonprofits, they single out 157 key drivers for scalability and 93 scaling strategies, then independently group the key drivers into coding categories and condense them into nine clusters. From these clusters, one precondition and seven key components are derived for scaling social impact. The 93 strategies are sorted into four overriding types. By interlinking the precondition, key components, and strategy types, our scalability framework responds to Bloom and Smith’s (2010) call to “specify under what conditions the SCALERS capabilities are related to scaling of social impact individually and collectively” (p. 141) and to Jenkins and Ishikawa’s (2010) declared research priority “to identify key enablers and critical success factors in this [scaling] process” (p. 14).

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