Thanks to all who contributed so far. The depth and range of experience is impressive. And it sheds light on why scaling is so difficult—it is undertaken in many ways in diverse contexts for different purposes through multiple pathways.
When Rob McLean and I wrote Scaling Impact: Innovation for the Public Good, we wanted to understand what innovators in the Global South considered successful scaling. We learned a lot. We also learned how much we still need to learn.
One area of learning is how to evaluate scaling efforts. This is distinct from evaluating whether an innovation/program/policy/etc. works (in some sense) at different scales. That is important. But as I see it, when evaluating scaling, the question is: How well has scaling been undertaken to achieve the best (in some sense) impact?
Part of my struggle in answering this evaluative question is perspective. I believe we always want to answer it from the perspective of the people who are affected by scaling. In addition, we may want to answer it from the perspective of the innovator who guides an innovation through its life cycle/pipeline/diffusion/etc. Or we might answer it from the perspective of organizations that run programs/sell products/advance policies that promote the use and/or benefits of an innovation or bundle of innovations. Then again, we might consider the many variations of an innovation that may be set loos by a discovery (for example, AI), and how collectively their competition and complementarity create impacts that, for better or worse, are often unanticipated. And then there is the larger systems perspective in which the innovation is one of many factors. This is not a complete list.
What perspectives matter? How feasible is it to consider more than one at a time? How do we take into account that some may benefit from an innovation and others do not? Or is it simpler than this?
RE: Evaluating Scaling Efforts: Measuring What Matters
United States of America
John Gargani
Posted on 23/12/2024
Thanks to all who contributed so far. The depth and range of experience is impressive. And it sheds light on why scaling is so difficult—it is undertaken in many ways in diverse contexts for different purposes through multiple pathways.
When Rob McLean and I wrote Scaling Impact: Innovation for the Public Good, we wanted to understand what innovators in the Global South considered successful scaling. We learned a lot. We also learned how much we still need to learn.
One area of learning is how to evaluate scaling efforts. This is distinct from evaluating whether an innovation/program/policy/etc. works (in some sense) at different scales. That is important. But as I see it, when evaluating scaling, the question is: How well has scaling been undertaken to achieve the best (in some sense) impact?
Part of my struggle in answering this evaluative question is perspective. I believe we always want to answer it from the perspective of the people who are affected by scaling. In addition, we may want to answer it from the perspective of the innovator who guides an innovation through its life cycle/pipeline/diffusion/etc. Or we might answer it from the perspective of organizations that run programs/sell products/advance policies that promote the use and/or benefits of an innovation or bundle of innovations. Then again, we might consider the many variations of an innovation that may be set loos by a discovery (for example, AI), and how collectively their competition and complementarity create impacts that, for better or worse, are often unanticipated. And then there is the larger systems perspective in which the innovation is one of many factors. This is not a complete list.
What perspectives matter? How feasible is it to consider more than one at a time? How do we take into account that some may benefit from an innovation and others do not? Or is it simpler than this?