Learnings from the Accelerating Change for Social Inclusion (CASI) project

1. 7 learnings to improve similar processes
October 2019

2. ACSI started from the idea that social innovation processes aimed
at improving people’s life can be accelerated by identifying
evidence-based innovations, and sharing the knowledge in order
to inspire social innovation agents towards local adaptation and
implementation.
Implementation
May 2016 – July 2019
UpSocial has developed the methodology,
coordinated the process, conducted the
research, and supported the agents
involved to explore the adaptation.
Participant cities
Collaborator
The project
Accelerating Change for Social Inclusion (ACSI)
2
Funders

3. Learnings
3
How to better catalyse existing solutions into local implementations?
Adapting existing innovations is more
efficient than designing new responses
to social challenges from scratch
Cities and organisations are constantly
experimenting with new approaches to
solve pressing social needs. Instead of
starting from scratch, the experience of
supporting social-innovations transference
confirms the power of adapting and
adopting evidence-based models to tackle
social challenges. Transference processes
require intensive analysis and adaptation
efforts but save time and dedication by
avoiding ‘reinventing the wheel’.
However, the ability to learn from existing,
proven innovations is not the only condition
needed to catalyse innovations within a
local ecosystem.
Cities need to activate their local
ecosystems in order to boost
innovation capacity
Local stakeholders still face multiple
barriers when adapting and adopting
existing social innovations: lack of time,
funding, human resources, political
changes and organisational inertia, among
others. In order to mitigate these factors, a
wider spectrum of committed local
stakeholders should be involved in the
process from the very beginning in order to
leverage their knowledge and innovation
capacity.
Cities can act as a unique ecosystem
activator. This role would require a strong
initial leadership, proactivity and a great
use of convening power to engage key,
committed stakeholders in a joint effort to
tackle common social challenges.
This entails going beyond the role of
facilitators in order to help other players
take the lead in the adaptation and
implementation, i.e. prioritising challenges
and innovations, facilitating meetings,
making connections, organising events and
providing different types of in-kind support
to the different projects.
Moreover, making a small initial economic
contribution to the implementation of the
selected initiatives might help legitimise
projects and encourage co-financing.

4. Learnings
4
How to better catalyse existing solutions into local implementations?
Alignment of expectations and a clear
role definition within a continuous
process
The engagement at early stage of a variety
of key actors from different sectors
increases the chances of a successful
implementation. Consequently, all the
potential needed roles (such as funders,
implementers, facilitators, disseminators
or referrers) should be distinctly identified
and engaged since the beginning in order to
avoid confusion as to expectations.
With this purpose, engagement could be
articulated in a working group with the
initial objective of defining an agenda and a
set of shared goals. This would allow a
deeper diagnosis of the local needs and
would guide the following steps, in which
new relevant actors would be invited to
engage in a continuous way.
Two essential ingredients are needed to
turn matches into implementations:
leadership and commitment. In order to
achieve this, players not only should
participate with the ambition to facilitate
adaptation and first steps, but also to
implement innovative solutions. For this
reason, they should be engaged in the
process since the very beginning.
Opening up the challenge definition to a
variety of stakeholders would lead to the
identification of levers of change related to
the drivers that mobilise them. This
requires for highly specific challenges. The
broader they are, the more generalist are
the agents convened at the beginning.
Under these circumstances, by the time
innovations are supposed to be
implemented, key players might not be in
place and would have to join the process
later, hindering their sense of ownership.
This emphasis on early, long-term
involvement also aims to foster
commitment among a variety of local
stakeholders. Having them on board in all
the project’s phases might help create a
sense of ownership and enabling exploring
local implementation of innovations that
are more aligned with their organisations’
scope of action, interests and strategic
priorities. Presumably, this would enhance
their interest in achieving good results and,
in turn, increase implementation chances.
From matching to ownership
Matching an innovative solution with a
group of capable, interested local players
that include all the profiles needed for
implementation is not enough to overcome
the initial barriers to adaptation.

5. Learnings
5
How to better catalyse existing solutions into local implementations?
Standarised information and transfer
model systematisation
Standarised information of an innovation
becomes a powerful tool to evaluate it
potential impact on a different context,
facilitating better decision-making.
It also encourages innovators to reflect on
the strengths and weaknesses of their
models, which acts as a driver for the
systematisation of existing knowledge, the
articulation of transference models and the
activation of impact measurement
strategies.
Recognising these issues and integrating
tools for analysis hopefully will result in
clearer, stronger value and service
proposals that will encourage local
counterparts to implement the selected
innovations.
Social innovation takes time
Transformation processes cannot be
cooked using a microwave oven: long
simmering is needed.
Various reasons for this long-term
approach to social innovation are on the
demand side: different actors need to be
aligned, have a shared understanding of
the challenge, common agendas have to be
built, as well as trust, commitment and
capacity.
Other reasons can be found on the offer
side, as not all the innovators have
developed mature approaches to
scalability. Most of the models have been
proved in their original context, but present
different degrees of experience and
success in terms of transference. Thus,
identifying and consolidating sustainable
scaling models is still a challenge for many
innovators .
Knowledge systematisation and
exchange
Transferring social innovations to
accelerate social change cannot be
delinked from knowledge generation.
The process itself becomes a very valuable
and demanded source of learning,
inspiration and exchange for all actors
involved.
Activities organised all along the processes
often work as meeting platforms or
networking spaces in which traditional
players, but also very different
stakeholders that are not used to working
together, find opportunities to interact.
These are, in the end, ways of
strengthening local, national, and
international social innovation ecosystems.

6. UpSocial
6
Solving social challenges through innovation
Social
Unemployment, early-school abandonment,
child poverty or the transition towards
more environmentally-friendly cities are
some of the challenges driving our action
towards more effective responses.
UpSocial measures its success by
evaluating the social outcomes generated
by the innovations it seeks to adapt, adopt
and scale.
Effective, sustainable and scalable
This is why UpSocial concentrates its
energy in finding and designing innovations
that have strong evidence of impact. These
solutions should also be sustainable,
capable of generating sufficient value and
income to implement them. Finally, we
demand innovations to respond to the
whole dimension of the need. In other
words, they should be able to scale up and
inspire a solution to the challenge in its
entire dimension.
Innovation
With increasing social needs and
inequalities, and with decreasing resources
to respond to them, it is imperative to find
more efficient, effective, fair and
sustainable solutions. Then, the challenge
is to take them to scale. UpSocial focuses
precisely on fostering innovation by
researching worldwide the best social
innovations and helping them to scale and
to be implemented in different locations.
Multidisciplinary and international
team
With this vision, a group of social
entrepreneurs with a long trajectory
created UpSocial in 2010. The team,
together with a network of well-selected
specialists, allows UpSocial to create
efficient teams around each project and
initiative.

7. Accelerating Change for Social Inclusion(ACSI)
Learnings
October 2019
www.upsocial.org
www.innovations.upsocial.org
@UpSocialBCN