Humanitarian innovation: untangling the many paths to scale

In February 2019, the GAHI launched a paper entitled, Humanitarian Innovation: Untangling the many paths to scale.  The paper responds to a persistent humanitarian challenge: why do good ideas, demonstrated through pilots, fail to reach a scale at which they can maximise value for crisis-affected people? 

The Untangling the Paths to Scale paper offers a new scale framework designed with humanitarian innovation in mind, shaped by four key factors: solution value, difficulty, contextual variation, and operational sustainability.  Each combination of factors may have its own methodology and scaling journey, offering innovators a broader, more realistic range of options for determining how to take innovations to scale.  Recognising the diversity of pathways to scale allows for a more realistic consideration of resources, skills, and steps involved in scaling.

This paper does not suggest that there is a “best” version of scale. The GAHI contends that the right level and form of scale varies depending on the specific case and pathway to scale: some factors should be optimised, while others may be sacrificed.