Introduction

In this chapter I turn to the broader experience of cross-sector collaboration to shift whole systems. How does social innovation become more than a series of interesting pilots and projects? How can the whole be more than the sum of the parts? How can whole systems be transformed – to better care for the old or young, or to solve serious problems, from crime to carbon emissions, through the kinds of action described in the last chapter?

There is a long history of experiments to align the actions of many different organisations across the public sector, civil society and business that are trying to achieve some kind of social change – better early years education; less violence; improved public health or urban regeneration. These have usually involved some combination of shared plans, targets and commitments. They have had many names. Many books have been written about them, and many universities have run courses to make people better collaborators. Responsible funders naturally want to find ways to make their money go further, and recognise that this is bound to involve collaboration – pooling resources of all kinds with others.

Yet one of the oddities of the field is that there is not much cumulative learning. I have regularly come across reports and articles, and outputs from consultancies, claiming to have invented new ways of doing this. They’re perfectly well intentioned, and many are doing important work. But they rarely make much, if any, mention of past experiences, and often appear to be unaware of the lessons learned.

In this chapter I describe what collaboration and collective impact are, what has been learned and how practice could improve.

Why now?

The topic of how to achieve large-scale, cross-sector collaboration to deal with social problems in places is an old one. Many big tasks require cross-sector, multi-partner, multi-stakeholder collaboration, whether in a geographic area or in a sector. Many tasks also require some shared institutional capacity to coordinate and drive actions.

The good news is that there are thousands of examples of systems change in practice. Some have been truly global, like the World Health Organization strategy to eliminate smallpox in the 1960s, the collaborations on vaccines in GAVI (The Vaccines Alliance), and the strategy to fight malaria in the 2000s.