Why ARC Innovation Lab?
Why Good Ideas Struggle
Why do some promising social innovations thrive while others struggle to gain traction?
The social impact sector doesn't suffer from a shortage of promising ideas. It lacks the infrastructure necessary to consistently identify, test, evaluate, and advance them. Through our work, we've identified four recurring barriers that make social innovation unnecessarily difficult: the Knowledge Gap, Value Gap, Resource Gap, and ROI Gap.
Knowledge Gap: It's difficult to know which approaches actually work.
Value Gap: What gets funded isn't always what creates the greatest value.
Resource Gap: Organizations lack the resources and capacity to experiment.
ROI Gap: Uncertainty makes investing in innovation feel unnecessarily risky.
Together, these gaps help explain why certain organizations often struggle to experiment—and why funders understandably gravitate toward familiar approaches with established track records. ARC was created to help close those gaps by making applied R&D more accessible: creating space for promising ideas to be explored, tested, evaluated, improved, and, when the opportunity warrants it, developed, implemented, scaled, or commercialized.
Applied Research
What we learn
Entrepreneurial Product Development
What we build
ARC bridges the gap between what we learn and what we build.
ARC is on a mission to give promising ideas for social change a better chance to succeed.
We believe that some of our most persistent social challenges represent overlooked opportunities to create both social and economic value.
Yet traditional research isn't necessarily designed to bring solutions to market, and conventional entrepreneurship doesn't always appreciate the commercial potential of solving complex social problems.
ARC bridges that divide—combining applied research with entrepreneurial product development to discover, validate, and build solutions that deliver meaningful impact and sustainable economic value.
ARC wasn't conceived in a conference room.
It emerged from doing this work.
Wesley Burt is a social impact entrepreneur and systems innovator with more than two decades of experience spanning technology, public policy, education, and the nonprofit sector. Throughout his career, he has focused on bringing together the right people, asking better questions, and using data, experimentation, and real-world evidence to turn promising ideas into validated solutions.
As a founding executive at LearnPlatform, he helped build a national education technology company designed to help schools evaluate the effectiveness of their technology investments; he later founded and led +BOX, developing and scaling an innovative nutrition security model that distributed more than 1.4 million pounds of fresh produce before merging with Brighter Bites. Today, through ARC Innovation Lab, Wesley brings those experiences together to help social innovators design, test, and validate new approaches to complex social challenges—helping communities make better investments in systems change.
