Scaling New Heights: How to Spot Small Successes in the Public Sector and Make Them Big

Examines barriers to bringing innovations to scale in the social sector and recommends developing a market for social outcomes, designing funding models that encourage scaling, shaping the field of knowledge about what works, and investing in mentors

A Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent

The magnitude of the food waste problem is difficult to comprehend. The U.S. spends $218 billion a year -- 1.3% of GDP -- growing, processing, transporting, and disposing of food that is never eaten. The causes of food waste are diverse, ranging from crops that never get harvested, to food left on overfilled plates, to near-expired milk and stale bread. ReFED is a coalition of over 30 business, nonprofit, foundation, and government leaders committed to building a different future, where food waste prevention, recovery, and recycling are recognized as an untapped opportunity to create jobs, alleviate hunger, and protect the environment -- all while stimulating a new multi-billion dollar market opportunity. ReFED developed A Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste as a data-driven guide to collectively take action to reduce food waste at scale nationwide.This Roadmap report is a guide and a call to action for us to work together to solve this problem. Businesses can save money for themselves and their customers. Policymakers can unleash a new wave of local job creation. Foundations can take a major step in addressing environmental issues and hunger. And innovators across all sectors can launch new products, services, and business models. There will be no losers, only winners, as food finds its way to its highest and best use

Organizing the U.S. Health Care Delivery System for High Performance

Analyzes the fragmentation of the healthcare delivery system and makes policy recommendations -- including payment reform, regulatory changes, and infrastructure -- for creating mechanisms to coordinate care across providers and settings

owards Mature Measurement Programs

Many organizations are using measurement as a means to improve their software development and maintenance processes. A reasonable consensus has been reached about the main success factors for measurement programs. However, no comprehensive approach has so far been published for the processes that need to be in place to ensure effective and efficient measurement. We propose a capability maturity model for measurement that can be used to both assess the measurement capability of software organizations and to identify directions for improvement of their measurement capability. This `Measurement-CMM' originates from our efforts to establish measurement programs in a variety of settings. These efforts had mixed results, and our analysis thereof showed widely different measurement capabilities amongst the organizations involved. A measurement maturity scale similar to that of the Software-CMM allowed us to explain many of the differences observed. At the same time, it suggests ways to impro..