Impact and Scale was a research and design project to investigate the efficacy and scalability of new social enterprises through a short term design research studio in three different regions of India. It was implemented in 2012 through the support of Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership.

Impact and Scale aimed to capture examples and ideas about how we can improve the design of social enterprise through contextual research. By understanding context and locality an idea can be both local and global and draw from these two areas of expertise.

To have impact, a social enterprise needs to do more than create just a series of products or projects. These enterprises should spark real change and have tangible outcomes. Scale implies that the social enterprise can grow beyond a one-off success or pilot to different communities and regions.

This project grew out of the Development Technology for Informality (T4I) course at the Institute in Spring 2011, a training program and seminar on current topics in technology and development. Selected students from the course joined in a summer research internship in Nairobi, Kenya.