The Anatomy of Scale: Lessons from a decade of scaling innovations.

What does it actually take to scale an innovation so that it improves the lives of millions?

Last week in London, the Global Innovation Fund (GIF) convened a group of partners and peers to tackle this exact question. The workshop, titled "The Anatomy of Scale", was a deep dive into the learnings and insights gathered from GIF’s ten-year track record of deploying patient capital to scale innovations targeting vulnerable and underserved people.

At GIF, enabling innovations to scale, through both financial and non-financial means, is our raison d'être. We define a ‘scaling success’ as any innovation which has reached upward of 300,000 directly or 1,000,000 indirectly (through B2B, B2G or public adoption).​

During the workshop we explored GIF’s track record and shared what we’ve learned about how scale happens, considering eight themes:

1. Scale models: features consistently help reach large numbers of people
2. Systems: how unlocking systems changes helps secure longevity
3. Evidence: the value of rigorous evidence in securing further investment
4. Teams: identifying the key qualities found in successful innovators
5. Additionality: maximising both financial and non-financial support
6. Sustainability: navigating the challenges that come with scaling success
7. Trade offs: managing the disconnect between people reached and people benefitting
8. Scaling failures: identifying common traits in innovations that fail to scale. 

Over a series of upcoming blogs, we will deep dive into these themes in more detail, extracting the key learnings from GIF as well as those shared by our partners and peers in the workshop. 

By collating our learnings, we can deploy development capital more effectively, accelerate the scale of more innovations, and create a thriving innovation ecosystem. 

As we look back on ten years of GIF’s journey, we are more convinced than ever of the importance of fostering these learning partnerships so together we can turn these insights into action.