March 29, 2011 | When Sally Osberg speaks about social entrepreneurship at national conferences or to the news media, she does not talk about “going to scale.” Rather, she intentionally focuses on “results at scale.” Why? So social entrepreneurs will think beyond organization size.

“We think ‘going to scale’ means the size of an organization -- how big you are, how many employees you have, how many offices you have, how big your footprint as an organization is and how large your budget is,” said Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation. “But there is great evidence that innovations can scale or impact can scale without organizations [being or becoming] behemoth. ...

“I don’t think that scaling and organizational size are necessarily correlated.”

Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay, established the Skoll Foundation in 1999 to identify and support social entrepreneurs and innovators through grants, scholarships and an awards program. The California-based organization also established the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, a research and academic center, at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. It also operates Social Edge, an online community that allows social entrepreneurs to interact with each other, and partners with the Sundance Institute to run a program that aims to raise awareness about social entrepreneurship through nonfiction storytelling.

Before joining the Skoll Foundation in 2001, Osberg was founding executive director of Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose.

She spoke with Faith & Leadership about results at scale, the role of storytelling in social entrepreneurship, and how to carry out a founder’s vision. The following is an edited transcript.

Q: Explain the difference between “going to scale” and “results at scale” and why you emphasize the latter.

The difference goes back to the paradigms we have in our heads. We think “going to scale” means the size of an organization -- how big you are, how many employees you have, how many offices you have, how big your footprint as an organization is and how large your budget is. But there is great evidence that innovations can scale or impact can scale without organizations [being or becoming] behemoth.

I worked for many years in the children’s museum field. A curator at a traditional collections-based museum, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, developed the first interactive museum at the turn of the century. Her name was Anna Billings Gallup, and she had this insight that you could put collections into the hands of children and they would have a more meaningful museum experience. That idea percolated in the field and was picked up by others -- by the Boston Children’s Museum in the 1920s and then the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. Folks who went to those institutions were very excited about them, and they went back to their communities and created their own children’s museums over time. In the 1990s, children’s museums were scaling phenomenally. Today, there are hundreds of them all over the country and hundreds of them all over the world.

You can trace the thread back sometimes, but oftentimes it doesn’t go back neatly to one person or one institution. You can see the evolution of ideas and the role of different organizations over time.

Civil rights is another example. It probably starts in the Enlightenment, but then you have the abolitionist movement in the 19th century in England. You have the role of the Quakers, and you have institutions being formed in the United States, like the NAACP, and you have charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. You have this whole sequence of ideas and new institutions and movements and defining moments. Ultimately, you get change, but at a progression over time.

Would you call that “results at scale”? I would say that when people who didn’t have the right to vote now have the right to vote, that’s social value creation and that is results at scale.

Q: What does this mean for organizations trying to scale?

I don’t think that scaling and organizational size are necessarily correlated. Innovations can scale through networks and partnerships, and they can do so, often, more effectively than any one venture on its own can.

I was in a meeting the other day where a colleague referenced the fact that only a handful of nonprofits have budgets that are bigger than $50 million.

You can have very big organizations that are essentially lumbering bureaucracies, and you can have smaller organizations that are very adept at partnering.

For example, an organization like Kiva works with microfinance institutions (MFIs) all over the world. It has a loan portfolio that now exceeds $200 million. It’s reaching more than half a million microentrepreneurs all over the world using an Internet platform it innovated and developed, but it couldn’t do that work without these partnerships with the MFIs. It depends upon that network to be able to get this funding that comes from largely developed-world investors. Some are investing $25, some a couple of hundred dollars, some even into the thousands of dollars. But they need that network of institutions to help them be effective.

The scale of the impact can be accelerated by an organization or by a charismatic social entrepreneur, but it doesn’t necessarily depend upon that organization going it alone.

The home computer revolution is a good example. It wasn’t just Apple and it wasn’t just IBM. It was an innovation that was picked up in the marketplace and was scaled through myriad organizations and their efforts.

Q: How do you build partnerships?

Partnerships begin with relationships and require common interests, and they get built over time between people. Trust, mutual interests and leveraging what you can do together is what sustains them.

Our Sundance partnership began with [founder Jeff Skoll’s] relationship with Robert Redford and then my relationship with Ken Brecher. Ken was running the Boston Children’s Museum when I was running Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose; when I went into philanthropy, he was running Sundance, and we joined up again. And Sandy Herz [Skoll’s director of strategic alliances] on our team has taken on the ongoing investment of time, energy and resources in building relationships.

A lot of partnerships and strategic alliances can be marriages of convenience. The ones we aspire to are true partnerships that create value that neither of us could create on our own.