Do social unicorns exist? Kieron Boyle sets out the ambition of the 100x Impact Accelerator to impact hundreds of millions of lives and discusses what this project can teach us about scaling research and social impact.

At LSE we are committed to “understanding the causes of things.” For decades, research has contributed to understanding the root causes of global challenges like inequality, poverty and climate change. But understanding alone isn’t enough. Real change happens when knowledge meets action. This is the rationale of the 100x Impact Accelerator at LSE: to turn bold initiatives into scalable solutions and explore the next generation of social unicorns.

What’s a social unicorn?

A social unicorn is a play on the concept of a commercial unicorn. But rather than a company worth a billion dollars, the idea is to examine what it takes to positively impact a billion lives.

And that matters: inspiring, impact-focused organisations are working on innovative solutions to address many of the world’s problems, but very few (if any) are at the scale needed. This means not much is known or shared about how to unlock the scale potential of different kinds of social innovations.

Of course, reach isn’t the only route to impact. Lots of powerful ideas are deeply context-specific. But, in the same way that we’d want a vaccine to reach as many people as possible, in an increasingly exponential global economy, we should have a clearer view of how other scalable solutions do the same.

How do you find a social unicorn?

One way of learning is to work alongside these organisations developing practical solutions — supporting them with significant financial, intellectual and social capital — and using that as a real-world lab to observe where and why innovations succeed and if and how they fail. That’s what we do at 100x.

Our model is to partner with impact-focused ventures from around the world, operating in areas such as health, education, and financial inclusion, typically in the space where states and markets fail. We carefully select organisations from thousands of applications for our programme. We are agnostic about whether these are non-profit or for-profit — what matters is that they have innovative solutions to improve the lives of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Crucially, we look for partners that already have significant reach, often with millions of end-users. We then collaborate with them to explore how to get that impact to as many people as possible. To do so, we draw on LSE’s world-leading research. For example, LSE academics are helping these ventures run some of the largest randomised control trials on health in sub-Saharan Africa, advising on educational policy reform in India, and connecting leading technology firms to better support the world’s 40 million refugees.            

Why social unicorns are rare

So, what are we learning?

First, ‘social unicorns’ might best be understood as impact models rather than single ventures. Much of our work focuses on how ventures can scale their approach to reach many more end users. Much of it also focuses on how the solution itself can spread. For example, that can be through government adoption or commercial adaptation. Fascinatingly, many of the organisations we work with are just as interested in both routes — for them, it’s the impact that matters, not venture growth alone.

Second, becoming a social unicorn is hard. One reason is that many positive impacts simply lack people able or willing to pay for them. Another is the absence of an organised capital structure that can take social innovations to scale. For commercial unicorns, one can draw a path from bootstrapping to IPOs and debt markets. Each part of that journey has a specialised role. It’s much less clear for social innovations, with frequent overlaps and gaps between philanthropies, impact investors and governments. That leads to huge inefficiencies on the part of everyone involved — gaps that institutions like LSE and other universities can help address, both through our deep networks in government and philanthropy and by educating the next generation of leaders shaping the flow of impact capital.

Third, we should be cautiously optimistic. Through 100x, we are identifying and supporting practical innovations that are very likely to impact hundreds of millions of lives. A particularly promising theme is frugal solutions that combine assistive, organising technologies (such as AI) with pre-existing physical infrastructure (often funded by governments or aid). An example would be telemedicine made available to community nurses at rural health facilities, giving the nurses access to more qualified health professionals. This allows for the more effective utilisation of scarce resources as well as the potential for rapid deployment across similar geographies.

Big questions, no easy answers

Of course, there are inevitably more questions than answers. For example, what innovations are needed for other innovations to be successful? In many instances, the end payor for a social solution will be the state. The public sector doesn’t have an excellent track record of scaling what works, so what innovations are needed there?

Other questions are more fundamental. When does reaching more people diminish or amplify the effectiveness of an innovation? Do any solutions cause greater harm than good? Are some ideas solutions in search of a problem? Where does accountability lie, and to whom? And why isn’t there a more organised capital structure for social innovation?

These are big issues worthy of detailed exploration. Over the next decade, we are building data on a globally significant set of impact-first organisations and identifying insights that can inform decision-making within governments, development institutions, investors and enterprises. This is all part of our mission of advancing social science knowledge to improve society, and all areas that we would like to collaborate widely on.

So, do (social) unicorns exist? The answer is rarely. But they can. And, perhaps more importantly, the ambition to pursue them tells us a great deal about what is practically needed to address the sheer scale of the world’s challenges.

You can see the full 100x portfolio here: www.100ximpact.org/portfolio.

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