Preparing Teams to Scale Innovations to the Summit
Through its Scale Readiness Workshops, UN Global Pulse is collaborating with UNFPA on its ambitious innovation goals.
By Amy Lynn Smith — Independent Writer + Strategist
No one climbs to the top of Mount Everest without extensive preparation — and plenty of support. And in many ways, bringing an innovation to scale is much like the journey up a mountainside to reach the summit.
UN Global Pulse’s Scale Catalyst offering is designed to help members of the UN family and beyond do exactly that. According to Patricia Loh, a Senior Analyst on Global Pulse’s Innovation Scaling Team, the Scale Catalyst programme is intended to support building capabilities for innovations that are ready to be taken to scale. The programme is an essential component of UN Global Pulse’s mission to partner with innovation teams across the UN family as they bring their concepts to scale. This includes building internal innovation capacity and encouraging cross-agency collaboration, with the goal of helping teams realise greater impact from their innovations.
A central aspect of the Scale Catalyst is the Scale Readiness Baselining Workshops. This series of three workshops is designed for teams working on innovations, which must have been piloted at least once and ideally multiple times to qualify.
“The workshop series is designed to take teams that are working on innovations through set frameworks to self-reflect and identify the main areas that are needed for scaling,” Loh explains.
An early adopter of the Scale Readiness Baselining Workshops is the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which considers innovation a key driver of the organization’s Strategic Plan for 2022–2025. According to UNFPA’s Innovation Unit, the plan aims to accelerate progress toward UNFPA’s objective to end three challenging issues: unmet needs for family planning, preventable maternal deaths, and gender-based violence and harmful practices.
“Innovation is seen within UNFPA as a key accelerator to achieving these transformative results,” says Dr. Nigina Muntean, Chief of the UNFPA Innovation Unit. “It is the mandate of the UNFPA Innovation Unit to mainstream innovation within the organization and help take innovations to scale.”
Pioneering innovation as a path to higher ground
Even before joining forces with Global Pulse, UNFPA had a robust innovation strategy. In working toward the goals of the UN 2.0 Quintet of Change — which Global Pulse supports and advances as one of its central tenets — UNFPA sees expanding its innovation capabilities as a critical step in developing new solutions. UNFPA has an emphasis on ensuring its innovations’ scalability, adaptation and mainstreaming into its programs to reach those left furthest behind.
One of the Innovation Unit’s core pillars to scale is its Equalizer Accelerator Fund, which supports investments to pilot, position, and scale innovations. The goal is to provide a space that encourages risk-taking and finance innovations that empower women and girls. What’s more, it offers an opportunity for the public and private sector to get involved.
“We are committed to making innovation an enabler for achieving gender equality on a global scale, best exemplified by the strategic implementation of the UNFPA Equalizer Accelerator Fund,” says Alexander D’alessandro, Innovation Specialist at the UNFPA Innovation Unit. “This transformative mechanism serves precisely to support innovations with, by, and for women, embodying our commitment to harness innovation to advance gender equality, amplify women’s voices in decision-making, and address key barriers to progress.”
UNFPA Innovation also supports UNFPA Country Offices in scaling their innovations by connecting them with key innovation actors, including opportunities to learn and grow such as UN Global Pulse’s Scale Readiness Workshops. This is just one example of the many innovation initiatives in place at UNFPA, including a number of internal programs including an “Ideas Bank” and innovation webinars for UNFPA staff.
“Through innovation, we aim to maximise impact and reach, thereby transforming lives at scale across different contexts and needs,” D’alessandro says. “We believe that fostering internal innovation initiatives encourages a culture of continuous learning and improvement, enabling the organization and Country Offices to rapidly adapt, respond, and scale sustainable and impactful solutions.”
Serving as a Sherpa in innovation scaling
According to Ahmed El Saeed, Innovation Scaling Lead at Global Pulse, the two agencies have had a good working relationship in the field of innovation since the early days of Global Pulse. In December 2021, Global Pulse and UNFPA agreed their mutual interest in taking innovations to scale made the Scale Readiness Baselining Workshops a particularly worthwhile collaboration.
“UNFPA were quite involved in co-creating the workshops based on what Global Pulse was offering,” El Saeed says, “and were very helpful in selecting the right types of innovations and country teams to participate in the workshop series.”
UNFPA had a number of innovation projects that were far enough along to participate in the Scale Readiness Baselining Workshops, involving 13 teams from 13 different countries representing Latin America, Africa, Asia, and more. Participants were split into two cohorts of about 15 to 20 people each, with each workshop in the series held twice to accommodate time zone differences. Participants included members of the UNFPA Innovation Unit and Country Operations, as well as some external partners.
A step-by-step approach to reaching the summit
Each three-hour workshop builds on the next. The first, named Scale Panorama, calls on participants to envision what their innovation might look like in 10 years — much like imagining a plan for reaching the summit in a mountain-climbing expedition. After looking at the long-term goal, participants are asked to think about the journey that will take them there, considering the barriers or success factors that will help them along the route to the summit, Loh explains.
“We look at their scale goal, which is like the first base camp on an expedition,” she says. “What do they need? And what does their innovation look like in the next 12 months?”
According to Aleksandra Okpala, Coordination and Capacity Building Specialist at the UNFPA Innovation Unit, the first workshop set the stage for scaling, including the potential for co-funding grants. “This provided our Country Offices with key tools on the available resources and how to effectively plan for scale-up initiatives,” she says.
The second workshop, Scale Assessment, asks participants to assess the solution and go through an imaginary stress test: Do they have a value proposition that defines their innovation’s features and benefits? Do they have organizational capacity, leadership buy-in, and enough finances? Do they have the right people on the team to take this vision to scale? This workshop looks at the next two to three years along the scaling journey, and includes exercises to help participants outline their goals in each step along the way.
Okpala says the second workshop helped Country Offices design new stages of their projects and find financial support.
The third workshop, the Scale Strategy, takes participants back to the big picture. They consider what they learned and developed in the second workshop, and explore any gaps that may exist in crucial areas such as solution integrity, organizational capability, and their network and partners.
“We ask them to think about any priority gaps in these areas, the tactics to bridge those gaps, and any assumptions they can make to allow them to achieve those tactics,” Loh says. “It’s trying to see how to address any problems, and the expected output is a scale strategy map. Teams should be able to walk away with a single page on the main steps on what they need to do next, or who they need to approach next, to take their innovations toward scale.”
In fact, Global Pulse’s Innovation Scaling Team expects participants to come away from the third workshop with a plan to talk to additional partners and team members to continuously refine their scale strategy map.
“Scaling is a very long-term process that can take anywhere from two to 10 years,” Loh says. “There’s not a hard cut-off point, and everyone is at different stages of their path, like an expedition.”
When considering the third workshop — and the series as a whole — the team from UNFPA recognizes the value in the structure.
“This sequential approach, strengthening the groundwork laid from the previous workshops, proved to be very useful in building a toolkit of knowledge and skills in supporting innovations,” says Okpala.
She adds that among the most important learnings shared by UNFPA’s Country Offices after the workshop series was the ability to identify and address potential challenges during the scaling journey, and the significance of a value proposition for project appeal. “These insights equipped the participants with a more holistic view of scaling, ensuring they are better-prepared for both the opportunities and obstacles that lie ahead.”
Staying together for the journey up the mountain
Loh says the feedback from the UNFPA participants was overwhelmingly positive — with all of the respondents to the post-workshop series survey saying they would recommend the Scale Readiness Baselining Workshops to their colleagues. They also said that the workshops helped them understand how to make their innovations scale-ready — the necessary steps, tools, and support needed to reach the summit of putting their innovation into play.
Global Pulse’s support doesn’t end after the series of workshops, either. Follow-up support is always an option, and Global Pulse offered an additional one-hour drop-in session for both UNFPA cohorts. What’s more, Global Pulse and UNFPA are discussing an extended program for Global Pulse to offer ongoing mentorship.
“Our perspective on innovation has been enriched through our collaboration with UN Global Pulse,” says D’alessandro. “The experience has highlighted to us and our Country Offices the critical role of cross-agency cooperation in driving innovation, reaffirming the principles of the Secretary-General’s Common Agenda and UN 2.0 transformation.”
What’s more, he says, the workshops validated UNFPA’s approach that innovation is more than just implementing ideas. “It’s also about fostering an environment that encourages creativity, openness, and collaboration. Our partnership with Global Pulse has solidified the understanding that scaling impactful innovations for women and girls worldwide necessitates not only technological advancements, but also strategic alliances and shared learning.”
To learn more about Global Pulse’s innovation scaling work and how it supports the UN 2.0 transformation, read its report released in April 2023 entitled “Scaling the Summit: How the United Nations can expand promising ideas to change the world.” The report includes input from many members of the UN family, including UNFPA.
To inquire about Global Pulse’s innovation scaling programmes and how you can participate, email info@unglobalpulse.org.
