Synthesis: tracking transformative impacts and cross-scale dynamics

Those interested in social innovation are often simultaneously interested in the concepts of scale and scaling for impact. The social innovation cases in this book reveal new understandings of scale and cross-scale dynamics in the history of innovation. The manner in which the actors involved in developing social innovations in a niche scale may expand and contract in number and type over time, the role that macro, landscape scale norms and values may play, and the critical influence that regime scale actors choose to exert (or not), all shape which social innovations prove to be most transformative. Granted, everything appears connected to everything else these days, but cases in this book highlight that it is the complex web of layered and nested connections and the way in which they cross the boundaries of space, time, sectors, knowledge, moral and philosophical principles, identities, resource types, and ideas that will matter most to social innovation.