To fail at scale! Minimalism and maximalism in humanitarian entrepreneurship

Humanitarian entrepreneurs seek to do well and do good by developing goods and services that directly address the world's most intractable problems. In this article we explore the expectations built into two of their products: a point-of-care diagnostic device and a solar-powered lantern. We show how these objects materialise both a minimalist ethic of care and a maximalist commitment to universal access for health and energy. Such maximalist commitments, we propose, are fundamentally utopian. The developers of these humanitarian goods do not envision their objects as stop-gap solutions or ‘band-aids’ for entrenched systemic failures but rather as the building blocks for new kinds of universal infrastructures that are delivered through the market. We trace the work involved in scaling-up the humanitarian effects of these devices through processes of design, manufacturing and distribution. For humanitarian entrepreneurs, we argue, to fail at delivering expectations is to fail at scale.