HGSE Announces Scaling for Impact

The Harvard Graduate School of Education will offer a new professional development program for educational leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs interested in effectively expanding their business and impact. The intensive, three-day program, Scaling for Impact: Strategies to Enhance and Expand What Works in Education, teaches education entrepreneurs with a program, product, or service about how to scale, adapt, and sustain their projects. The program will be held March 9–11, 2016 at the HGSE’s Cambridge campus. Registration is open.

“One of the most persistent problems in the field of education is bringing successful entrepreneurial ideas to scale. While there are many pockets of excellence in the field, there remain fewer examples of long-standing models that have had sustainable impact in terms of depth, breadth, or scope to reach their fullest potential,” said Professor Monica Higgins, Scaling for Impact program chair. “To ultimately achieve equity in education, we must ensure that high-quality programs reach those who need them most. While Harvard has been actively engaged in launching new enterprises through the i-Lab and entrepreneurial contests and challenges across the university, we also have a role to play in scaling the excellent work in education that currently exists. The Scaling for Impact Initiative is designed to help entrepreneurial leaders and their teams take their initial success to the next level of work.”

Participants will identify in advance a problem of practice to work on during the program, and learn different approaches to achieve impact at scale. Participants will explore the barriers to scaling, including increased demands on leadership teams, difficulties accessing funds for growth, and how growth can threaten quality and sustainability. They will also explore alternative paths to scale, including brick-and-mortar versus online, replication versus adaptation, and possibilities for collective impact.

Additionally, the program will consider the skills it takes to be a strong entrepreneurial leader such as how to delegate and sustain a culture of success. Scaling for Impact will provide a venue for entrepreneurs to interact with one another, to share their successes and challenges, and to build a developmental network for ongoing connection.

Learn more and apply.