Lean Impact (PDF)

For more than thirty years, lean manufacturing has been a key component of industrial success. Almost all manufacturing operations use, or have used at some point, some aspect of lean. Lean Impact applies these principles to the world of social innovation, helping nonprofits, government agencies, philanthropists, and impact investors build better solutions that deliver the most value to users.

Lean Impact takes the main ideas from Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup,1 and customizes them to the specific challenges of social good. The book is organized around three objectives: value, growth, and impact. It provides real-life examples of how to identify assumptions, test them with minimum viable products (MVPs), and learn from the results of these tests in order to build solutions that are embraced by beneficiaries, address root causes, and have engines that can accelerate their growth to scale.

This book will help those doing social innovation – from nonprofit staff and social entrepreneurs to corporate project managers and triple bottom line companies – deliver dramatically more impact with the same amount of money. It will also help those funding social innovation – foundations, government agencies, philanthropists and impact investors – create the incentives that encourage measured risk taking and the adoption of innovative approaches. And it will help the broader public recognize the pathways they can take to maximize their own impact with their time, money, or other resources.

There are many wonderful stories in this book about organizations that are using their own data to understand what people really need, how they’re iterating on the fly, and how they’re achieving transformational change. They’re set all over the world – from a company that started by selling eyeglasses but has since expanded to providing education and employment to thousands of people in Indonesia; to an effort to keep poor families from going hungry during the lean season in rural Uganda; to a solar light program that has now reached 12 million households worldwide.