The entry of both the ed entrepreneurs and the venture philanthropists prepared to support these entrepreneurs through early stage development en route to large scale success has usefully challenged the existing status quo with respect to both pedagogy, classroom management, school management, relationships with parents and so on. But the principal difficulty they have faced is the problem of reaching significant scale in their operations. The reason has already been noted: the big buyer in the educational sector is usually the government, and governments have so far been reluctant to shift as much money to a marketized or individualized system of ed financing as would be required for these “new schools” to gain a significant market share in the supply of educational services. The reason for government’s reluctance to do so can be attributed to two quite different causes. Those who like decentralized market systems see government’s reluctance as evidence of its capture by existing suppliers – primarily by public schools, but also by more established voluntary sector providers. Those who are concerned about the capacity of the national educational system to advance social goals beyond the satisfaction of individual educational consumers worry that the individual educational suppliers encouraged by the private sector philanthropists tend to focus too much on firm level success rather than system level success, and to define educational achievement at the school level too much in terms of consumer satisfaction and not enough in terms of the development of individual economic, social, and political capacity. As the educational entrepreneurs have come up against the limits of philanthropic support to sustain and grow as well as simply initiate educational innovations, and realize that the will have to find wider public support to scale their efforts to national impact, they are being forced to recast their arguments from a focus on client approval at the individual level to a focus on client impact at the individual level, and social impact at the national system level. What that means for the future of educational social entrepreneurship is unclear.

######## Building a Professional Movement for Community Problem Solving Policing

One last example comes, again, from my own experience, and is therefore somewhat suspect. I include it, however, because it was based explicitly on the understanding that the powers of the status quo, institutional mimesis, and professionalism powerfully influence the conduct (and therefore the performance) of large social production systems in many fields including education, health care, social work, and so on. The key question was whether those forces could be used to promote a widespread innovation in given field that shifted both the commonly accepted ends and means of the field at large, and perhaps even more significantly, shifted the suppliers in the field to embrace a commitment to continuing innovation as they sought to respond to changing social conditions, and (to some degree) changing social objectives. For over a decade, I worked on an effort to change the dominant model of policing in the United States from what I described as the “professional model of policing” which had dominated the field for about a century to a different model of policing described as “community problem solving.” The new concept re-defined the ends of policing to include crime prevention, fear reduction, and the handling of social conditions in communities that produced fear, hostility, and disinvestment beyond crime. It re- defined the means of policing to go beyond the traditional activities of patrol and investigation (which were essentially designed to reduce crime by arresting, or threatening to arrest, individuals who had committed or might be inclined to commit crimes) The new capacity was built on using the vast amount of data the police naturally absorbed through the calls for service that came in through 911 systems, the