Humanitarian Innovation: Untangling the Many Paths to Scale - GAHI

Authored by Lesley Bourns, Dan McClure and Alice Obrecht on behalf of the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation (GAHI)

First published in February 2019, this 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 people affected by crises?

The Untangling the Many 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. Recognizing the diversity of pathways to scale allows for a more realistic consideration of resources, skills, and steps involved in scaling.

You can find out more information about this resource on the GAHI website and through watching the video below.