Executive Summary
In Fall 2023 the Scaling Community of Practice (SCoP) launched a three-year action research initiative to study how organizations working in international development, principally funders, mainstream scaling into their operations–a “Mainstreaming Initiative”. As such, this initiative and this study do not focus on scaling or how to scale innovations, interventions or projects, but on how to transform an organization to systematically support, operationalize and affect scaling, i.e. create a scaling organization. During the first year of that initiative, the SCoP and the partner organizations who agreed to participate in this effort have produced thirteen such case studies as well as an interim synthesis report and policy brief summarizing the first set of case studies.
This paper constitutes a new case study and contribution to the Mainstreaming Initiative. It covers how scaling has been integrated into Feed the Future (FTF) as an effort of the US government to combat global hunger and malnutrition: “[FTF] brings partners together to address the root causes of hunger and poverty by boosting agriculture-led growth, resilience and nutrition in countries with great need and opportunity for improvement.”[1]
This case study specifically and narrowly focuses on the work of Feed the Future Agricultural Innovation Laboratories (hereafter Innovation Labs) and appropriate parts of the relevant USAID bureau. It complements an earlier case study of FTF that analyzed efforts of the US Government to integrate and coordinate its various agri-food assistance programs across federal agencies in support of a more effective approach to addressing global hunger and poverty.[2]
Innovation Labs are funded and intended to conduct research, develop and take to scale safe and effective technologies and innovations that address current and future challenges posed by changing climate, hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. Innovation Labs are led by top U.S. universities, working in partnership with other universities, with agri-food research organizations, and particularly with research and educational institutions located in the Global South. The number of Labs has varied over the fifteen year life of FTF; there are currently seventeen Labs, including climate, fish, food safety, horticulture, livestock, peanuts and soybeans.
The study describes and analyzes USAID’s journey and continuing efforts to integrate scaling into FTF Innovation Laboratories. It identifies both the progress made and the challenges faced in achieving this mission. Given its focus, this paper is of particular interest to organizations working on or funding research and innovation in general, and especially in the agri-food sector.
Scaling was an objective of FTF and Innovation Labs from their inception but was not initially integrated or operationalized into the way research was funded, supervised and conducted. In the first several years research efforts did not explicitly focus on generating scalable innovations nor on identifying and handing off innovations to suitable partners; Labs lacked guidance, capacity or incentives to integrate scaling into their work. They were constrained by limited financial resources and legislative limits on their activities.
Integrating scaling into research institutions requires specific institutional arrangements, skills and mindsets. Because all Innovation Labs are based in universities, their leadership and staff have historically embodied academic incentives and a culture focused more on publishing in refereed journals than hand-off to partners for commercialization, let alone achieving impact at scale. Innovation Labs have until recently lacked the institutional arrangements and approaches that guide successful public-private partnerships and technology delivery. To the extent they had partnerships with organizations in the Global South, they were other universities or national research centers. They also lacked the skills, experience and mindset to pursue scaling: transitioning from academic research (discovery) to the delivery of market-led solutions requires new skills and capacity and a change in approach, attitudes and objectives. These specific conditions and obstacles had to be recognized and addressed for the Labs to support effective scaling.
Scaling was not initially integrated into the relationship between Innovation Labs and FTF projects, FTF monitoring and evaluation indicators, nor the structure, responsibilities and capacity of the Bureau of Food Security (BFS), which leads USAID’s FTF work. While innovations were supposed to be picked up and integrated into FTF projects, mechanisms to effect this were weak or lacking, so that it often did not happen. Monitoring and evaluation indicators for scaling were not part of Lab grants or supervision. Some scaling indicators existed for FTF country projects, but these tended to be limited to project duration, so that true uptake at scale, let alone sustainability, could not be tracked. BFS itself was not designed to be a “scaling organization”; the Bureau itself does not develop or fund field-level strategy or individual FTF projects; these are the responsibility of the individual country Missions in the countries the US government has designated as FTF countries.
As experience was gained with Labs, a more integrated approach to scaling was developed and included formal scaling guidance, tools and regular inventories of progress. BFS developed specific criteria and indicators to track scaling. It introduced a regular inventory of innovations produced by Innovation Labs to track progress, the Research Rack Up, that incorporated these criteria, revealing that Labs’ self-scoring of scaling progress often did not correspond to objective measures and criteria. Over the last several years the Bureau has developed a suite of tools for scaling up innovations. Most notably and much more recently, it has adopted a Product Life Cycle (PLC) approach to research management and, working with the Soybean Innovation Lab, translated that into an approach and tool called Innovation to Impact (i2i). i2i aims to integrate scaling into research projects right from the beginning, helping to track and enhance progress towards sustainable impact. It helps Labs set measurable scaling objectives, encourages them to engage local partners to identify and address scaling barriers. i2i is being piloted by several Innovation Labs, and it includes a toolkit to enhance the commercialization of research outputs. In parallel, the Bureau is working to incorporate the PLC approach into FTF procurement and project planning generally.
BFS has found that partnerships are key to scaling but require substantial efforts to create several preconditions: integrating scaling into how innovations are developed and produced, and strengthening local partners. BFS has worked to foster partnerships to facilitate scaling, such as Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation Clearinghouse, IFAD, and African Seed Trade Association, to build awareness for these innovations and attract commercial partners interested in scaling them, based on a model which has emphasized hand-off to the private sector. In the past, the data and evidence produced by Innovation Lab’s data was often weak or missing on the business case for commercial actors, e.g., the size of the potential market; production costs; profit margins. BFS has been working to help Labs produce data relevant to private partners and to document costs and a business case. Moreover, BFS has found that hand-off to private partners is necessary but not sufficient.
Working with and through partners required complementing innovations with investments strengthening local actors and systems. In parallel, BFS made investments in agri-food systems in the Global South (e.g., strengthening seed systems and local seed breeders). This was a result of a shift in BFS’s focus towards transformational scaling, emphasizing broader systems change rather than simply increasing beneficiary numbers. Hand-offs require: (i) a strong product-market fit, preferably with open-source designs; (ii) dedicated business development efforts, aligning expansion plans with business growth stage; and (iii) commercial partners, who require working capital financing, patience and tailored support to continually refine business strategies and investor materials.
An integrated scaling approach required changes in the organizational structure, capacity and roles and responsibilities of USAID BFS itself. The introduction of these approaches was complemented by a series of restructurings of the Bureau. The most recent transition of BFS was to be renamed and restructured as the Bureau for Resilience, Environment & Food Security (REFS). This has brought new roles and responsibilities specifically focused on scaling technologies and commercialization. Dedicated roles for scaling efforts were established and support for scaling operations was formalized within various divisions. Divisions within the Bureau are working collaboratively to integrate scaling into their operations, ensuring that both physical technologies and accompanying knowledge and services are bundled effectively. For example, the Market Systems & Finance Division (MSF) has a Commercialization and Scaling Team whose objectives include creating effective scaling strategies and an enabling environment for partnerships and policy changes. Similarly, scaling is now being integrated into how Innovation Lab awards are made and oversight provided. Collaborative efforts have been put in place within the Bureau, such as between MSF and the research team, to align and coordinate efforts and ensure that innovations can be effectively scaled and integrated into the agricultural landscape. This has proven critical to achieving FTF’s goals of providing long-term, sustainable benefits for smallholders and broader communities at scale.
In sum, this case study provides valuable insights into the various actions that USAID’s FTF program has taken to mainstream scaling into its funding of agri-food innovations over the past decade. An important characteristic of this journey, and the mainstreaming actions taken, is that – as with scaling itself – mainstreaming scaling into the Innovation Labs required an iterative learning and adaptation approach wherein problems were identified and measured, solutions were developed and tested and then rolled out. It also shows that mainstreaming requires a multi-pronged, organization-wide approach: developing guidance and tools; revising monitoring indicators; changing mindsets and institutional arrangements both within the funding organization and recipients, coordinating research funding and oversight with work on markets and partnerships, and even restructuring the funding organization itself.
Perhaps most importantly, it emphasizes that while a partnership approach is essential to scaling for most innovation funders, there is more to it than simply expecting innovators to hand off to partners. Innovators need to target scale from the beginning and keep this front and center throughout the various stages from basic research to testing and piloting innovations, especially generating information that potential partners will require. The stage gating principle or PLC approach is one that should be considered by all innovation funders and innovating organizations for whom the characteristics of their innovations would benefit from such an approach. These efforts need to be complemented by investments to strengthen local systems and the specific partners who are expected to receive these handoffs. This very much aligns with USAID’s localization vision and approach[3] of having priorities and projects locally led, inclusive of the voices of marginalized, and especially local capacity strengthening. This case study shows that all of these are key to mainstreaming and supporting scaling.
[1] https://www.usaid.gov/feed-the-future#:~:text=Feed%20the%20Future%20is%20America’s,need%20and%20opportunity%20for%20improvement.
[2] Julie Howard (2024). “Mainstreaming Scaling: A Case Study of Feed the Future (FTF), The US Government’s Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative: Successes, Challenges, and Lessons.” Scaling Community of Practice. https://scalingcommunityofpractice.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Scaling-Up-at-FTF_USAID-FINAL.pdf
[3] USAID “Localization at USAID: The Vision and Approach August 2022”, https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2022-12/USAIDs_Localization_Vision-508.pdf
