Social entrepreneurs working in Africa would seem to be a world apart–literally–from most U.S. business executives. But two professors from the Wharton School say there are more similarities than might be apparent at first. Social entrepreneurs in developing countries, they say, work in highly challenging, highly uncertain conditions–and so do corporate managers who wrestle with all kinds of social, economic or demographic changes.

Guided by ten years of field work, plus particularly close inspection of 10 Wharton-sponsored social entrepreneurship initiatives,?James D. Thompson, director of the Wharton Societal Wealth Program, a social entrepreneurship initiative based at the school, and Ian C. MacMillan, management professor at the Wharton School, identified seven strategies for launching successful projects in risky environments. In general, says MacMillan, he advises those beginning new ventures to “start sooner than later, but start smaller rather than bigger, and learn (their) way into success or termination.” ?Here are Thompson and MacMillan’s seven tips:

Decide what level of achievement counts as success or failure. While the researchers recommend starting out with small pilot programs, they also say it’s imperative to know how high you’re aiming. The hope is that the small pilots will grow quickly. If you don’t know how big you want those pilots to grow, or how that could happen, maybe you should reconsider. As a pre-requisite to get an animal feed project going in Zambia, for instance, a Wharton-initiated project had to show it could increase the consumption of chicken by at least one million daily protein servings per year. Incorporate sociopolitical forces into your strategy. That means taking a hard look not just at the governmental policies but at entrenched business competition. In Botswana, a large medical software company that stood to lose business from a medical records initiative claimed that information sharing was impossible because of database incompatibilities. It turned out only minor fixes were needed. Keep costs low in the beginning and plan for scalability. Start with the smallest version of the business that has a shot at success, and plan to learn and grow from there. Establish specific measurable goals of what you plan to provide, whether that’s 130 grams of cookies, an hour of tutoring, or passenger/miles flown. Preplan a realistic exit strategy. Especially in social entrepreneurship ventures, it’s important to understand how a failing project can be abandoned without hurting the people it was designed to help. “The idea here is leave a minimal footprint,” says MacMillan. Anticipate unintended consequences. Of course, this is difficult to do, hence the word “unintended.” One example: The animal feed project has succeeded in increasing the size of chicken flocks. But now farmers have no good way to dispose of the larger quantities of chicken feathers, because there is no existing method to recycle them. Learn, then invest. The authors suggest creating an extremely early-stage business plan with 10 to 15 assumptions that are continuously tested and revised. In the case of a South African cookie business, the original plan called for local distributors to sell the cookies. But in order to reach customers with more disposable income, the company is now looking to ship container loads of cookies as exports.

What strategies have you used when launching a new project in uncertain conditions? Do you think any of these tenets would have been helpful?

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