The Problem and Solution

The private sector has the luxury of a highly competitive marketplace to determine which products and services suit the needs and tastes of consumers. The result is that consumers decide which products and services they like and which ones they don't like. Presumably, the best products and services thrive while inferior products sit on the shelves and inferior services are intentionally shelved by the company providing them.

In the social sector, however, things aren't nearly this black and white. The products and services NGOs and other organizations provide are just as much in demand as in the private sector. In many cases, demand can be considered much greater since what's being offered by social sector organizations can be a matter of survival for beneficiaries. Without free market principles at play, though, these beneficiaries don't necessarily have a say in which ones thrive and which ones fall by the wayside. They too often tend to resemble guinea pigs more than consumers. Effective versus ineffective programs are subject to great debate due to the complexity of accurately gaugyig social impact.

The Solution

While spreading adaptive blueprinting principles across the social sector doesn't represent a panacea for the social sector's many problems, it does hold great promise. When organizations with shared causes make concerted efforts to do a better job of distinguishing the "good, the bad, and the ugly" blueprints, the most ineffective ones can be quickly "weeded-out" while the most innovative ones are given an opportunity to flourish through wide-scale replication.

The NGO sector is full of innovative blueprints creating measurable and lasting solutions to social problems. However, this does not mean that creating and implement successful blueprints is easy to do. On the contrary, it usually takes years of trial and error and learning from past mistakes before ideas and models are worthy of wide-scale blueprinting or replication. At the same time, it is also plagued by the persistence of ineffective blueprints and a lack of synergistic partnering between organizations with overlapping missions.

As a result, the age-old expression, "there's no need to reinvent the wheel" is far from being realized. The lack of collaborative efforts to spread proven blueprints results in wasted resources and mistakes repeated by NGOs over and over again. Global Gain has thus taken the expression about wheel reinventing as a call to action. Our aim is to find the most innovative blueprints, understanding them with all their intricacies, and help NGOs find partners well-equipped to adapt them under many different regional contexts.