Much progress has been made in the social sector to design and test solutions to address the big, seemingly intractable problems we face as a society. In addition, much is also known about the diffusion of innovations, which explains why, how and at what rate new ideas or “things” spread.

However, two questions remain: first, although in many cases we have figured out "what works,” why don’t we don’t yet have many examples of things that work at scale? And second, when new ideas and practices do spread and begin to achieve impact at scale, how might we prevent this from exacerbating existing inequality and systemic inequities?

So far this year, we have been talking with experts; conducting desk research; and running experiments with students in a pop-out course this past spring and will do more in a course this fall. We are learning a lot, and new questions are emerging.