Successful Scaling in Social Franchising: The Case of Impact Hub

Social entrepreneurs increasingly use franchising to scale social value. Tracey and Jarvis described how social franchising is like commercially-oriented franchising, but noted critical challenges arising from dual goals. We investigate a social franchisor that overcame these challenges and describe how the social mission became the source of business model innovation. We show that the social mission fostered a shared identity that guided the search for adaptations to the franchise model. The shared mission-driven identity created pressure toward (1) decentralized decision-making, (2) shared governance, and (3) a role for the franchisor as orchestrator of collaborative knowledge sharing among franchisees. Findings should help social franchisors avoid common pitfalls and suggest future research questions for social entrepreneurship and franchising scholars.