By Marc Schut m.schut@cgiar.org and Murat Sartas, February 2019
Scaling Readiness presents a scientific approach to support impactful scaling of innovations. Scaling innovations is one of the biggest challenges facing research and development organizations. For the past 3 years, a group of scientists representing Wageningen University and the CGIAR global research for development partnership worked on the design and testing of Scaling Readiness. During this period, Scaling Readiness components contributed to scaling activities of more than 20 projects in 25 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Although developed to support scaling of agricultural innovations, Scaling Readiness principles can be applied to enhance the scaling of innovation in other sectors, including education, health, sanitation and energy.
Scaling Readiness unpacks innovations and scores their readiness for scaling. This enables the identification of scaling bottlenecks and making decisions on what kinds of investments, activities and partnerships are required to overcome the bottlenecks. An example of the Scaling Readiness assessment is an innovation package to combat cassava diseases in Tanzania (see graph). The package consists of different innovations that are assessed for their innovation readiness (y-axis) and innovation use (x-axis). Low readiness and use of a functional government seed system is the main bottle- neck to scaling in this example.
Through its standardized data collection and analysis approach, Scaling Readiness can be used to monitor a portfolio of innovation and scaling investments at program or organizational level. It also supports prioritization, and decisions on advancement of those innovations that can achieve societal outcomes at scale in the most resource efficient way.
The recently launched Scaling Readiness Web Portal provides more information on the concepts, practices and use of Scaling Readiness. It also offers visitors an opportunity to ‘Let’s Try’ Scaling Readiness. Please visit the Scaling Readiness Web Portal (www.scalingreadiness.org) or download directly the Scaling Readiness Guidelines for more information. We are looking forward to your feedback.
