Mapping the Big Green Challenge - The Skills & Learning ...

70 Chapter 6 - Proposed Innovation Processes6.4.4 Approaches to Transferring BGC ApproachesAs part of Challenge process applicants were told that they needed to demonstrate that their ideascould have a wider impact. They were asked to show it was one or more of the following: replicable(able to be repeated), transferable (able to be used in a different context) or scalable (able to grow).These provided a way for applicants to discuss how they anticipated that their proposals would betaken up by those beyond ‘their community’ (i.e. those the challengers thought they could have animpact on within their immediate proposal).Chart 35 shows the way proposals were classified in terms of their approach to this issue. The largenumber of proposals (around half) which took an ‘undirected’ approach (where the applicant had nodeveloped plans to share their idea outside their target community) could be identified as aweakness of community innovators in terms of their ability to transfer or replicate their ideas. Inmany cases it did appear that the Challengers were only interested in the scale of the project thatthey had conceived. They were not acting in a proprietary way and often said that they were happyfor other groups to visit them however they did not appear to be interested in actively spreadingtheir approach. There were a small number of cases however where this model did not imply a lackChart 35 – Mode ofTransferability, 316 proposalsUndirected51%Directed24%Growth22%Takeover3%of thought or interest in transferring their experiences and incontrast involved a well thought through means of spreadingtheir idea through networks of like-minded people in anaccessible way.Further analysis in Chart 36 shows that registered companies(which tend to be social enterprises) are more likely to planorganisational growth, although even here this only accountedfor around a third of the group. There is a significant minoritywith similar intentions within the un-constituted group. Theymay well have been cases where the expectation was ofsetting up some form of enterprise model in the longer term.Directed diffusion which covers a wide range of options ofretaining some link with, if not control over, the idea via someshared identity is easiest for organisations that are alreadypart of some network of organisations doing similar things (although the strategy could include thecreation of such a network). Takeover was not a popular strategy by any of the types of groups butwas apparent in cases where the Challenger simply felt they had a good idea that was best pursuedeither commercially or within the public sector by somebody better equipped than them to do so.However, Undirected Diffusion was the largest single approach within all types of Challengers andparticularly prominent among the Constituted groups.Appleby Ltd July 2009