The Development Impact Lab (DIL), headquartered at UC Berkeley and funded by USAID, has developed a new approach to innovation in the context of global development. The approach – called “Development Engineering (Dev Eng)”–merges advances in engineering with insights from the behavioural and social sciences. In addition to providing a robust, interdisciplinary framework for designing and testing new technologies in the field, DIL encourages researchers to build scale into the R&D process, from the beginning.
Yet the precise barriers to scale are often ill-defined. There are few generalizable mechanisms for scaling evidence-based interventions in emerging markets. To learn from ongoing efforts, DIL hosted their annual State of the Science conference on "The Science of Scaling".
The conference brought together academic researchers, development practitioners, technology developers, and investors to review the evidence on scaling successful anti-poverty innovations–particularly those developed at universities. Are there proven methods for technology transfer from universities to government agencies and non-governmental organizations? Why do some products and interventions scale quicker than others? What facilitates the adoption of new technologies by end-users? This event explored these questions and helped articulate a research agenda for the “Science of Scaling”.
This one-day conference was anchored in the burgeoning field of development engineering, with insights for other disciplines. Sessions includes oral paper/research presentations, plenary sessions, and facilitated networking sessions bringing together stakeholder groups. New evidence, as well as novel research endeavors and new or strengthened collaborations emerged from this meeting, ultimately ensuring that more technologies were able to rapidly scale to meet the demand of consumers in emerging markets.