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This pathfinder addresses how social innovations develop, grow, and spread. We aim to sup-port social innovators worldwide in turning promising ideas into useful ones. In contrast to other manuals that focus on the question of how to generate or adapt ideas, we go beyond the problem definition and ideation phases. We want to avoid having good ideas fail and we want to show how choices under your control can have a dramatic impact on success.
Our guide examines 12 best practices for successfully implementing, scaling and spreading social innovations. These are based on existing resources, and they build upon input from 14 experts whom we are grateful to have interviewed and/or collaborated with. The cases show real-life processes, impacts and challenges, and together they form a rich and varied picture of social innovation in practice. Although these cases’ patterns of growth vary in detail, at the end of this guide we highlight their overarching and outstanding qualities as key learnings for policymakers and funders of social innovation.