On May 11, Columbia World Projects (CWP) held a meeting to discuss the challenge of scaling projects that aim to improve people’s lives. A range of experts took part in the conversation, led by CWP’s research and engagement team, which bring together academics and practitioners to engage with pressing social issues. The meeting was the first step toward determining how Columbia World Projects can rigorously study questions surrounding implementation – including how best to scale philanthropic projects—as it launches a series of such projects around the world.

“At the heart of Columbia World Projects is the ambition to connect deep scholarship and deep practice,” Ira Katznelson, Columbia’s interim provost and a Deputy Director of Columbia World Projects, said in opening remarks at the meeting, adding: “This gathering today is part of an ongoing effort, in early phase, to think hard about implementation broadly understood.”

The meeting was broken into several sessions, each of which began with opening remarks from subject experts and was followed by a discussion between all participants. Wafaa el-Sadr, the director of Columbia’s ICAP, and Macartan Humphreys, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, opened the first session, which centered on what we can learn from both successes and failures in scaling projects. The presenters issued goals of developing a common vocabulary around scaling issues and proposed an agenda that might help funders, practitioners, and researchers find ways to rigorously test variations in project designs and their impact across different contexts.

The second session centered on financing and knowledge sharing platforms, including what the most challenging gaps in funding for scaling are and how universities and practitioners can help to facilitate the shift from small-scale discoveries to generalizable ones. Jonathan Papoulidis, Executive Advisor on Fragile States at World Vision, and Alexis Bonnell, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID, gave opening remarks. The presenters put forward questions relating to “adaptive scaling,” asking if practitioners might better focus on goals rather than technical solutions initially, and then adapt solutions to address changes in context and scale.

A third session focused on the role public actors play in scaling. The session touched on topics including how projects can be designed to make policy adoption by public actors more likely (and more successful) and what actions public actors should take to support local adaptations of scaled projects. Benjamin Kumpf, Head of Innovation at the UK Department for International Development; Lynn Freedman, Professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University; and Yuen Yuen Ang, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan gave opening remarks. Together they asked questions about how political and economic processes matter when scaling projects and also raised distinctions between projects conceived and scaled by experts versus projects that emerge from the grassroots and are later scaled by development or state actors.

The meeting’s final session centered on how Columbia World Projects could pursue its work on the topic of scaling, including commissioning papers on specific issues, organizing workshops, developing training and teaching materials. “Following this meeting, we are assembling two working groups that will continue these explorations and help inform research and practice involving systems change, adaptive scaling issues, and experimental design,” said Thomas Asher, Director of Convenings at CWP. The groups, he noted, will advance scholarship on these topics as well as propose new ways of arranging funding mechanisms and project design in order to encourage experimentation in project activities and, ultimately, greater success at scale.