The Scaling Scan: A practical tool to determine opportunities and challenges to sustainably scale innovations

Scaling of innovations for the public good is a deliberate and planned effort to enable the use of innovations to have a positive impact for many people across broad geographies. With only a few years remaining to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) it is important that governments, private sector and others are successful in scaling. But, research shows that few innovations scale and that positive effects at small scale (for example in pilot projects) nearly never hold at the large scale, in any sector! Furthermore, scaling has the potential to make things even worse. People persistently assume everything can and should scale, that others will continue scaling once the project ends and that a successful pilot is a guarantee for success at scale. Wrong!