Disruptive Innovation for Social Change

Throughout the world, affluent nations, institutions, and individuals generously fund social services that fail to fully deliver on their promise. It’s not a lack of solutions but rather misdirected investment. Too much of the money available to address social needs is used to maintain the status quo, because it is given to organizations that are wedded to their current solutions, delivery models, and recipients.

What’s required is expanded support for organizations that are approaching social-sector problems in a fundamentally new way and creating scalable, sustainable, systems-changing solutions. This method called catalytic innovation provides good-enough solutions to inadequately addressed social problems.

Catalytic innovators share five qualities:

1. They create systemic social change through scaling and replication.

2. They meet a need that is either overserved or not served at all.

3. They offer products and services that are simpler and less costly than existing alternatives.

4. They generate resources, such as donations, grants, volunteer manpower, or intellectual capital, in ways that are initially unattractive to incumbent competitors.

5. They are often ignored, disparaged, or even encouraged by existing players for whom the business model is unprofitable or otherwise unattractive and who therefore avoid or retreat from the market segment.

when the objective is to get a system unstuck and to create new change models, it is time to go in search of catalytic innovations. While there are many guides to smart investing and philanthropy that focus on identifying traditional sustaining innovations to support, investors seeking catalytic innovations have few sources to rely on.