Introducing a New Podcast: Scaling the Summit

Illustration by Ina Fiebig and Shanice Da Costa

Welcome to our first episode, “From Innovation to Impact.”

Scaling the Summit is a podcast developed by UN Global Pulse and the UN Innovation Network. Each episode explores elements essential to scaling innovations in development and humanitarian work, drawing on relevant innovation research and sharing experiences from a wide range of practitioners. Ultimately, we hope to give insight into what it takes to move from an idea to a fully scaled solution within the UN system.

In our first episode, launched February 1, 2024, we’ll dive into what the journey to scale looks like in practice. We’ll shed light on some of the most common obstacles that innovation teams encounter when trying to scale their innovations, and unveil some key strategies that can inspire and guide innovation teams on their scaling journey.

Here is an edited transcript of the podcast, which you can listen to here.

Episode 1: From Innovation to Impact

Innovation is not about lightbulb moments. Innovation is an extended journey moving from an idea to something that creates value. The early journey is full of twists and turns, roadblocks and one-way streets that require detours — but at least there is a pattern to it that is by now well-understood. It involves considerable iteration and pivoting, but eventually a solution emerges that can be launched and piloted.

The trouble is that scaling that solution beyond the pilot stage doesn’t happen automatically. If we use the metaphor of trying to reach the summit of Mount Impact, where our innovation really makes a difference, then the front-end stages of creating and piloting a solution are just wandering around in the foothills. We’ve still got a lot of hard work to do to complete the journey — and the going gets tough from here on in.

Scaling an innovation is not just a matter of spreading a solution to a wider market. It involves adapting and extending it to suit different contexts and developing additional skills and capabilities within the innovating team. It requires resources to open up new delivery pathways, and a network of “complementary assets” — in other words, who else and what else do we need to bring this innovation to scale?

So we urgently need a map of that journey up the mountain. That’s why UN Global Pulse, the UN Secretary-General’s Innovation Lab, conducted extensive research last year across the UN system and beyond to identify insights on how to best scale innovations. The result was the “Scaling the Summit” research report, which highlights the challenges of scaling innovation and how to support teams throughout the process.

Where does it hurt?

Analysis of innovations on the scaling journey suggest a number of key “pain points” that can prompt innovators to search for solutions. Typical roadblocks on the journey are:

• Scale readiness. Innovations might be viable solutions to local or specific problems but are not inherently scalable.
• The team that develops the innovation isn’t always the best team to handle every stage from start-up to launch.
• There may be a business model in place but there isn’t a scaling vision or the necessary scaling framework.
• There is a lack of sufficient funding, or the funding isn’t flexible enough, to support the investment of time and resources needed to move to scale.
• There is a failure to move beyond early adopters to influence the majority of potential adopters in the marketplace. This requires taking multiple factors into account, such as perceptions and characteristics of both the innovators and potential adopters.
• Failure to create and sustain an ecosystem of relevant partners to support scaling.

What’s the cure for scaling journey pain points?

Recognition of these difficulties in moving beyond pilots to fully scaled, impactful solutions has led to extensive exploration of the ways the journey might be better supported.

The challenge is two-fold:

1. How to find specific interventions that can deal with the pain points on the journey.
2. How to create a structured vehicle for supporting multiple cohorts of innovators through their journey to scale that integrates these specific interventions.

The good news is that there is growing experience in supporting teams on their journey to scale to address the first challenge. The “Scaling the Summit” report identifies many parts of the UN system where there is help available to deal with key roadblocks.

Examples include:

• Support for developing a “Scale strategy,” challenging and refining business models, and planning a long-term staged approach to scale.
• Tools and techniques for assessing “Scale readiness” — reviewing what’s been achieved and stress testing the solution to see if it can be scaled and is sustainable.
• Designing and delivering a variety of targeted solutions to key challenges like marketing and intellectual property management.
• Supporting team development to ensure the right mix of skills and effective team dynamics.
• Exploring teams’ different needs for mentorship — including how to deliver it at different stages along the scaling journey — applying different modalities of engagement, and matching mentors to teams.
• Providing flexible funding that allows for experimentation and pivoting during the scale journey. Open-ended funding is more suitable for innovation projects, because there may be new iterations or changes in direction along the way.
• Supporting innovative teams as they carry out the complex task of assembling and operating a network of partners to create a viable ecosystem to scale their innovation.
• Implementing metrics for monitoring and evaluation that are more appropriate to the specific challenges of scaling innovation.

In terms of the second challenge, there’s growing experience and support that provides a consistent process for guiding promising innovations to scale. Many UN entities are already scaling innovation and sharing lessons learned, revealing behaviour patterns that work as experiments and can be systematically embedded in processes, policies, and structures.

It’s clear that there’s plenty of room for further exploration of how we can create supportive environments, also known as innovation spaces, and develop mechanisms like flexible and phased funding and other strategies to help innovating teams successfully scale their solutions.

In our next episode we’ll pick up on the question of mentoring. Tune in on March 7 when we’ll be joined by experts Ian Gray, Clara Van Praag, and Chrystina Russell.

In the meantime, here are some resources if you want to explore further:

Learn more about the UN Group on Scaling Innovations

Join the UN Group on Scaling Innovations

The Scaling the Summit podcast is hosted by John Bessant, Emeritus Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Exeter, UK, and Senior Advisor for Innovation Scaling, UN Global Pulse.