One of the shortcomings of social enterprise is the drive to innovate. Social leaders spend a lot of time looking for innovative solutions when many already exist. This is a problem. Time and money are poured into developing new programmes to meet social need when so often this work has already been done and could simply be copied or adapted. Social entrepreneurs and even large organisations start new projects rather than researching what has gone before and learning from it.

Read our article Resist the Urge to Innovate – Supersize like McDonald’s published on The Guardian, we explore the essence of social franchising: a proven social change project can be turned into a “franchise” and then quickly replicated.