How to scale: tactics to enable the adoption of humanitarian innovations

This learning paper, the third in our Scaling Series, outlines six practical tactics for scaling innovations through adoption by other organisations.

Much research has focused on understanding the challenges to scale innovations in the humanitarian sector. Our Scaling Series of learning papers focuses on helping innovators, the innovation ecosystem, and the wider humanitarian sector to take practical steps to overcome these challenges and increase the frequency of innovations transitioning from proof-of-concept pilots to sustained adoption in humanitarian response. 

The purpose of this paper is to provide a playbook of tactics for innovators who are aiming to scale through enabling other organisations to adopt their innovations. It may also be useful for innovators seeking to scale their innovation to other teams, offices and locations within their organisation that have not been involved in developing or testing the innovation. 

The paper draws on the experiences of teams behind ten innovations, and from existing literature. The innovations are selected from a wide range of sectors, types of organisations (private sector, national non-governmental organisations, humanitarian organisations, start-ups) and geographic reach (national or international).  

The ten innovations involve a range of complexity from the perspective of adoption (level of adaptation required, how easily the innovation fits within the existing system, scope of investment required), and have different degrees of technological focus such as handwashing stations, training toolkits, and app-based solutions). 

The paper summarises six tactics used across the ten case studies: 

Tactic 1: Determine your long-term role
The role your team plays in delivering an innovation is the foundation for the innovation’s future implementation and business model.  

Tactic 2: Build and use your network
Understand your key actors, their relationships, and how your networks function. 

Tactic 3: Build on what already exists
Sustainable foundations for adoption can be found by embedding your innovation in national or international systems. 

Tactic 4: Make it easy to integrate
Make your innovation as easy as possible for teams to adopt into their existing practices. 

Tactic 5: Work with the entire adopter
Don’t just work with one team, unit, function or department. 

Tactic 6: Move beyond innovation grants
Transitioning to mainstream adoption makes innovation funds harder to secure – establishing a diversified business model is essential. 

The paper also shares a deeper examination of how five of our case study innovations applied different combinations of these tactics to drive uptake of their innovations: Wash’Em, Start Ready, RedRose, DMS-Himalaya, and Mum’s Magic Hands. 

This learning paper was prepared by Abi Taylor, HIF Innovation Manager and Ruth Salmon, HIF Senior Innovation Manager.