Emad Nasher – Field Ready MENA
In October this year, we brought together 18 innovators from the Creating Hope in Conflict (CHIC) Proof of Concept (PoC) and Transition to Scale (TTS) cohorts for our second in-person innovator workshop in Istanbul. A collaboration between Grand Challenges Canada (GCC), Gray Dot Catalyst (GDC) and Response Innovation Lab (RIL), the ‘Expedition’ workshop built on our time with the teams at our Nairobi Basecamp in January and the mentoring sessions provided by GDC throughout the year.
The scaling expedition: understanding the available routes
When innovations and start ups are on their scaling expedition, they need to make a number of decisions on what routes they take. From what type of organisation they want to be, to what they want to do with their intellectual property, where they are going to register their organisation and who they are going to partner with (or not!), the decisions are endless. Understanding these decisions and mapping the different routes innovators may already have started down or that are still available to them was a key focus during the workshop, to help inform innovators’ next steps.
Business Model Path Dependency Exercise
To structure our work together in Istanbul, we worked on two themes across the expedition week – being investment ready and being partner ready. In the investment ready theme, we explored the need to have a viable business model in order to attract investors and got a Venture Philanthropy perspective from Stefan Germann CEO of Ursimone Wietlisbach Foundation who is also an experienced innovator / entrepreneur himself, to understand what they might be looking for from innovators. In the partner ready theme, we explored the types of relationships that unlock the most value, and discussed the fact that these relationships aren’t all necessarily called ‘partnerships’.
Both of these themes throw up questions and considerations that highlight the different routes that innovators can choose to take on their scaling expedition. In this blog we share a couple of key insights from across the week.
The decisions that determine your route: Business Model Path Dependency
During the workshop we ran an exercise with the teams to unpack some of the decisions that they had made (or still needed to make). Innovators explored the decisions that they have made about their innovation across three dimensions – a) whether to open source or keep their IP proprietary; b) whether to register as for profit or not for profit; and c) who to focus on as their target customer or consumer base – and the implications these decisions have on the business models that are available to them.
We mapped out key decision points and asked the teams to explain which choices they made, why they made them, and what effects those choices had. The discussions showed that the innovators had taken many different paths for different reasons — for example, to get better access to funding or to keep control over the quality of their innovation.
“We chose to have proprietary IP to protect the product; handle competition and meet quality standards.”
“We are open source and for profit, sometimes it’s tricky to explain to external stakeholders that you are humanitarian but for profit.”
“We chose to be for profit for cross-subsidization so we could balance impact and commercial viability.”
Although we only looked at three main decision points, those led to 12 different possible outcomes. For each outcome, we showed how many business models were available to the teams that ended up there. Out of 36 possible business models, the teams had between 9 and 30 options, depending on the choices they had made earlier.
Just three decisions they had made on their expedition so far had created such a big difference in the business model options available to the teams. This is path dependency, and we will explore it further in our upcoming paper on Path Dependent Business Models for Social Impact Innovations, which will be released soon.
Understanding relationship routes: not everything is a partnership
In the being partner ready theme, we unpacked the concept of what a partnership is, and isn’t! Partnership is a word that is often used to label almost every conceivable type of relationship between organisations, causing all kinds of complications between organisations that are trying to work together. To address this tendency, in our ‘Partnership Foundations’ sessions we explored the concept of a partnership continuum. Developed by the Partnership Brokers Association (PBA), and delivered by GDC Associate and PBA Lead Trainer, Michelle Halse, this framework helpfully outlines a range of engagement styles, from ‘command and control’ through to ‘partnership.’ The teams carried out an exercise to situate themselves in one of 6 engagement areas based on the definitions of each of the relationship types outlined in the continuum.
For each organisation, being able to situate where they are on the continuum, and explore where other organisations are, enabled them to begin to understand the reasons for some of the misalignment of expectations there might be in any potential collaboration. We found that providing language and a framework for expectation discussions with potential partners was extremely helpful for many of the innovation teams, helping them to better understand what it means to be partner ready and the different relationship routes they might want to take as they scale.
We really enjoy working with this cohort, and it is a privilege to see the connections that they are making with each other, including how they are supporting each other in areas such as brokering relationships, providing market insights and working through shared pain points together. We look forward to working with the cohort as we move into 2026 with bespoke support for them on their journey to scale, including creating opportunities to connect and learn from one another and our wider network.
Leonardo Shamamba Kinyungu – STAND-UP