Scaling Social Impact

Posted by Suhit Anantula on 23 December 2011 | 0 Comments

Hello! I am Suhit Anantula, the new Business Coach of Family by Family.

As you would all be familiar, the Radical Redesign team at TACSI over a year of innovation created the Family by Family Project. Now, the project is headed by Carolyn, there is a new team and they are expanding. Where to next? What the team at TACSI rightly identified is that as a social enterprise, how can we increase our social impact? How can we scale? That is where I come in.

My background is in business. I worked in sales, Investment banking, social entrepreneurship in rural India, many failed startup attempts, the environmental field and currently working in Families SA with an MBA. In all these roles, I have learned that there is tremendous value in using Business tools and techniques in the social space.

In simple terms, how can we scale Family by Family. What is the business model required to do this? From a business point of view, what the Radical Redesign team has achieved is a new methodology to create innovative products. The working backwards methodology of social sciences plus design thinking has a great potential to come up with new solutions for social problems. However, we need a methodology to scale it, to grow it, to increase our social impact.

The best analogy I can give is the iPhone. Before the iPhone, a smartphone looked like a Blackberry. The best keyboard, emails, BBM messenger, internet on the phone etc. After the iPhone innovation every smartphone started to look like it. That is great product innovation. That is not enough though. The growth of the iPhone and its increasing impact is due to a number of other factors like superior manufacturing, supply chain management, marketing and sales, financial management, negotiations with carriers, Apple retail stores, creating the App store and developer relationships and on and on. You get the idea. There is tremendous business model innovation and organisational capability behind the product development.

This is the exact kind of work that is required to scale Family by Family. I am a big believer in design thinking and will be using the design thinking principles to develop the business model behind Family by Family. I am very excited to work with Family by Family as well as Brenton and the rest of the team at TACSI.

As we learn to scale Family by Family, we will be sharing our experiences here. In due course, we should start to codify this knowledge in such a way that it can be shared across other new product innovations that will be coming out of TACSI.

For more on business and the social sector, check out my blog - www.worldisgreen.com