Lean Impact Free PDF Download

The world needs more solutions that work – to reduce poverty, fight disease, tackle climate change, create jobs and so on. To do so, non-profits and social enterprises must innovate in a business-like manner focusing on delivering value to customers while relentlessly seeking impact. This is a challenge that cannot be solved by funding alone. Funding can only de-risk or facilitate a project, and it can rarely provide the wherewithal for it to pivot or scale.

Lean Impact introduces a new way to solve problems for the better, by applying the principles of the lean startup movement. It shows how non-profit and social enterprise teams can design and test their ideas using small experiments and rapid iteration, learn quickly from their results, and ultimately deliver a solution that works at scale.

The book is filled with inspiring examples including a story of how a passion for saving orangutans led to a solution that provides local health services in Indonesia; a program that helps rural families survive the “lean season” between planting and harvesting; an effort to improve access to education in India; and a network that enables poor people to use their mobile phones to find jobs and get the help they need.

This is a valuable book for those working to build and scale social interventions. It will also help those who fund them – foundations, government agencies, philanthropists, impact investors, and donors – create the right incentives for measured risk taking, and direct their funds toward more effective projects that maximize social impact.