Based in France

Snowball Effect

A For-profit with social mission

How This Works

As part of the TRANSFORM Support Hub, you will learn how to advance your career while getting hands on experience with organizations like this one.

Organization Details

Snowball Effect was born out of 2 main observations: 

  1. A lot of aspiring social entrepreneurs struggle to find THE right idea to launch their impact startup (and they tend to reinvent the wheel). 
  2. Many founders of successful social businesses struggle to find the right people to spread their solutions elsewhere. Those issues result in the fact that proven social businesses are not replicated in other regions, although they could effectively solve the same problem elsewhere. 

Snowball Effect supports aspiring social entrepreneurs who don’t want to reinvent the wheel to replicate proven social enterprises in their region. 

We are at the crossroads between being a school and a matchmaking program: our participants get training to have the right skills and methodology to replicate, a direct connection with the initial founders to learn from them, and a European network.

The solutions to solve the social & environmental challenges already exist. It's high time to spread them!

Impact Story

The world is facing unprecedented social & environmental challenges that are urgent to tackle and we know they are out of one man’s reach.

Despite the fact that this can be daunting, the good news is that social enterprises addressing those challenges efficiently already exist!

Imagine if those solutions were scaled where needed in the world to solve the issues at a glocal level? This is what we aim for. We plan to do so by turning aspiring social entrepreneurs into “replicators”, meaning impact entrepreneurs who replicate already successful ventures and by fostering collaboration between those stakeholders. 

Indeed, we believe that replication can have a game-changing impact on a societal level: 

  • As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates in his book “The Tipping point”, if 16% of a given population starts changing behaviour, this new behaviour automatically becomes mainstream among the whole population. With the same logic, if the services and products of proven social businesses reach 16% of European consumers, those could become mainstream ones in the near future. Our goal is to foster the replication of proven social businesses in Europe so that they can reach 16% of the population, to automatically become the new norm.

  • Replicating the same type of businesses in several countries across Europe reinforces their visibility towards policymakers, who can make them scale at the national levels through new legislations and generate a systemic impact. 

We want to offer an entire paradigm shift based on collective success and collaboration, rather than competition. The scale and complexity of the challenges to address today urge us to collaborate, learn from one another and spread what works! Concretely speaking, we aim by 2025 to enable the replication of 100 green and social businesses in Europe, which will indirectly impact the lives of millions of people!