UN Global Pulse Scale Accelerator: Behind the Scenes
With the announcement of the Scale Accelerator Programme’s first winners, we mark a significant milestone in the UN Global Pulse’s mission to support innovation across the UN family. This post is the first in a blog series providing a sneak peek into the programme details, its methods, sessions, and behind-the-scenes activities. Join us as we reflect on this collective learning journey experience filled with valuable insights and reasons to celebrate.
The Path to Scale: Insights from Our Journey
The debut call of the Scale Accelerator Programme attracted 70 applications from 18 different UN entities spanning the globe. From climate action and diversity and inclusion to human rights and gender equality, these submissions showcased the UN family’s remarkable dedication to tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges through a diversity of innovative approaches.
This number, though, also highlights a critical gap the UN Global Pulse team identified in mid-2021; that although we, at the UN, undertake numerous pilot projects, they rarely scale up. To explore avenues to potentially mitigate this pain point, the team conducted long-term research and developed an evidence-based report, “Scaling The Summit,” built around a single vexed question: Why is scaling so difficult?
The report reviewed experiences and practices supporting social innovations throughout various agencies, framing it as a learning journey to achieve scale and systematically overcome common obstacles. It also provided practical recommendations for scaling practices within and across the UN, which were later expanded into the UN Global Pulse Scale Accelerator Programme. This programme was designed with Scaling The Summit’s main learnings and recommendations at its core, aiming to become a system-wide service for unlocking the potential of innovative solutions within the UN to grow from the pilot stage to scale.
The Innovation Scale Accelerator Programme Curriculum
What does good support look like for innovators to scale? Evidence from research, experiments and numerous perpetual pilot projects highlight a never-ending list of needs: flexible funding sources, continuous investments in team development, brokering and partnership support, strategic mentoring, performance and replicability assessments, technical advice on Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL), communications and innovation storytelling and knowledge of revenue stream models. Additionally, tools for developing financial models, prototyping and forecasting market sizing are just some of the many critical skills and elements that constitute an ideal scaling ecosystem.
The UN aims to address complex challenges that require highly orchestrated collaboration to innovate and design sustainable, scalable solutions that governments, civil society, and networks of various groups can implement. Ideally, these creations should outlive their creators, with others taking on the work once scale is achieved. However, this is only sometimes the case, even within the UN system, mainly because ecosystems often need more support for such high levels of collaboration and engagement across different stakeholders. The recognition of this pain point alone is one of the factors that makes the Scale Accelerator Programme so unique. While typical UN accelerator programmes often focus on providing internal support, the Scale Accelerator Programme is open to all UN entities, our programme is open to all UN entities and is intentionally designed to breed connections across UN teams and the member states we serve.
At the UN Global Pulse Scale Accelerator, the strategy component is crucial. Right from the outset, within its six modules, each team is tasked with developing its Scale Strategy, which helps participants undertake a comprehensive and structured approach to the future of their innovations. They are encouraged to consider the solution’s entire life cycle, including maintenance, upgrades, multiple pathways and all aspects of the new value they aim to create, gradually recognizing that scaling social innovations not only takes time but also demands cultivating and nurturing a strong value network distributed across diverse ecosystems.
Lessons for the Future
The inaugural run of the Scale Accelerator Programme has been an invaluable learning experience, offering insights that will significantly inform and enhance future iterations. Though a trial, this first cohort marks a milestone worth celebrating, highlighting our achievements and the areas where we can grow.
The UN Global Pulse mission is to support UN teams in experimenting and adopting new skills and approaches to become more innovative, effective, anticipatory, and better informed to support and serve member states, the planet and the people. Therefore, as we conclude this initial phase, we acknowledge that our work is far from complete. From the call for applications to the winner’s announcement, we have embarked on a comprehensive collective learning journey to critically analyse every aspect of the process and nurture the innovation ecosystem built up to this point.
We envision teams from this first cohort, three years from now, looking back and seeing this programme as a pivotal moment in their scale journey, having gained essential tools and insights that propelled their innovations forward. Achieving this would be a significant milestone, demonstrating the programme’s success in uniting and supporting diverse UN entities to innovate and scale together. This reflective approach aims to prepare us for even more impactful, refined and transformative future cohorts, ensuring that our efforts in supporting innovation within the UN family continue to mature and improve in achieving the Secretary-General’s vision for a Common Agenda for the future of global cooperation based on an inclusive, networked, and effective multilateralism.
We invite you to stay connected and learn more about the Scale Accelerator Programme’s journey in its mission to foster a collaborative ecosystem that drives sustainable and scalable innovations to address the world’s most complex challenges. Follow us on LinkedIn and visit the programme page for updates and insights into the first cohort. For further information and to receive announcements about future cohorts, please contact our colleague Patricia Loh via email at patricia.loh@un.org .
