Blog
Matthew Taylor
Here’s an issue which has cropped up time and again in conversations about social innovation: Those who give small and medium sized grants to social enterprises trying to move beyond the start-up phase face a conundrum. On the one hand, they want to fund the best ideas with the best chance of achieving impact. On the other hand, social start-ups often don’t have the capacity and skills to make the strongest, most evidence based, case for their work. In particular, it is unusual to find applicants who have thoroughly answered these simple but tough questions: ‘what other initiatives are very similar to yours?’, and ‘why is yours positively different?’