Scaling Social Impact at Tony's Chocolonely: How Interactional Dynamics Shape Social Innovation Processes and Drive Institutional Change

Abstract

Social enterprises are frontrunners in social innovation, yet our understanding of how they can scale their social impact beyond local, contained contexts remains nascent. To transform the institutional environment that gives rise to social problems, social enterprises must mobilize actors with divergent interests, values, and beliefs to change their practices – a process often complicated by incumbents who resist social innovation efforts and marginalize or co‐opt social innovators. Drawing on the social innovation and social movement scaling literatures, we identify a significant puzzle: how can social enterprises avoid marginalization and co‐optation while scaling their social impact? We address this question through an in‐depth case study of Tony's Chocolonely, a social enterprise dedicated to eradicating child labour in the chocolate industry. Our study offers two contributions. First, we show how social enterprises can scale their social impact beyond local, contained contexts by unpacking how different types of interactions and associated scaling outcomes create moral and competitive pressures for incumbents to change their practices. Second, we show how social enterprises can fend off risks of being pushed into a niche market or of being pressured to weaken the robustness of their solution, thus avoiding marginalization and co‐optation while scaling their social impact.