Growing Successful Organisations
“We need a sea change in attitudes… towards innovation and entrepreneurship…” —Report of Ireland’s ‘Innovation Taskforce’ to Create Jobs, March 2010
One of the central recommendations of recent government and private sector thinking in Ireland is to attract venture capital in order to scale or grow innovative Irish companies. We believe that this same approach can be applied to the education, social and community sectors. There exist today a number of highly effective and innovative voluntary and community organisations that hold potential to provide Ireland with progressive social solutions. Enabling successful programmes and organisations to spread their social impact and supporting ventures to ‘go national’ will both create jobs and contribute towards the health, safety and well-being of our population. This is progressive change.
What is the service?
The Centre for Progressive Change offers a service to locally-based innovative and effective organisations who wish to examine the feasibility of scaling up their impact or replicating their work in other sites, nationally and internationally.
The service offers technical support to review the following:
- Readiness for growth
- Possible receptivity of replication in other places
- Resources required and strategies to source them
- Risks of growth
- Returns of growth
Once this feasibility study has been completed, we can provide the technical assistance to:
- take next steps to lead and manage the internal change necessary for growth;
- document or manualise successful programmes and organisational ethos;
- develop marketing materials and training programme to assist in sourcing private and public funds;
- bring programmes to scale, with special attention to management of change.
Who is the Service for?
Locally-based community and voluntary organisations, Local Authorities.
A Recent Project
The Centre for Progressive Change has recently completed a piece of work on the first phase of a scale-up project. We worked with the Board of Directors and Staff Leadership Team of large community development organisation to prepare the groundwork for scaling-up their operations and programmes within selected Irish sites. This work involved:
- training members of the orgnanisation in the nature of and requirements for scale-up;
- identifying organisational steps to get ready to grow;
- examining potential sources of revenue for going national;
- developing marketing materials to garner seed/venture capital; and
- developing a manual for the replication of their early years education and care franchise model.