Copy Here, Paste There? On the Challenges of Scaling Inclusive Social Innovations

Abstract

This article addresses the question of under which conditions established social innovations aiming at improving social inclusion may be transferred from one specific environmental context to another. Through the example of an in-depth case-study on the PIKSL laboratories in Germany, the authors develop insights into the importance of innovation-friendly ecosystems as preconditions of successful breaching and scaling of social innovations. Previous work (cf. [1]) provides a generic understanding of such an ecosystem and proposes a ‘context understand guide’, which is applied to the specific use-case of a social innovation initiative and its goal to scale their new solution. On the basis of a working definition of inclusive social innovations and a critical reflexion of scaling concepts the authors draft a framework which is then applied to the PIKSL initiative. In the following, a set of questions is presented to which those inclusive social innovation initiatives can answer who want to systematically plan a dissemination process of their ideas, theories and methodologies. Main outcome of this paper is an instruction of how to apply the context-understanding guide to the scaling process of inclusive social innovations.