A New Way To Scale Organizations

Author Vinod Rajasekaran
Diving into the ingredients to successfully scale proven innovations with Geraldine Cahill, Director of UpSocial Canada

Why It Matters

UpSocial launched in Barcelona in 2010, with the goal of scaling up demonstrable proven innovations, rather than reinventing the wheel. Now, they’ve launched a Canadian office. The renewed focus on scaling proven innovations well is timely as Canada’s new Social Finance Fund goes live.

Tell us about UpSocial. This is an import from Spain. What has been the impact there that applies to the Canadian context?

It is about getting behind proven demonstrable innovations to help them scale. To do this, UpSocial works with a multi-stakeholder group of concerned people. For example, in Barcelona one of their earliest clients was a telecommunications company focused on educational outcomes among youth. There was a 50 percent youth unemployment rate at the time and that was part of the motivation.

What made it work?

In this case, the company wanted to help solve the problem. UpSocial didn’t want to have to push a process, there had to be motivation there. There are a lot of problems in the world, so there needed to be a desire to meet that demand. You need resources behind you to see something scale. You’re already pushing uphill, so you want to go where there is a

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