What is the Science of Scaling?

Scale was the focus of the 2016 State of the Science conference, hosted by Development Impact Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Devex rounded up eight key takeaways for global development professionals looking to expand their impact.

Anti-poverty innovations can make real progress on sustainable global development when they transition from startup to scaleup. But scaling is easier said than done, particularly when it comes to technology transfer from universities to end users.

“Academics are notoriously bad at spinning out ideas from the ivory tower into the real world,” Temina Madon, executive director of the Center for Effective Global Action, told Devex at “The Science of Scaling.” Scaling was the theme of the 2016 State of the Science conference hosted by Development Impact Lab, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley. “At the same time a lot of academics are trying to build institutions for spin out and scale up. USAID and other donors are constantly talking with us about scaling scaling scaling without a sense of the barriers and constraints we face. So we wanted to start unpacking what the pressure to scale means for us.”

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