Abstract
Innovation is essential for our ability to overcome global issues such as climate change, natural resource depletion, and inequality. A central aspect of innovation is the scaling process. While an abundance of studies on innovation scaling exist in many different disciplines, there is a lack of shared understanding of what scaling means and how it can be successfully achieved. This systematic literature review addresses both these issues by reviewing 147 articles on “innovation scaling” making several contributions to research on innovations and innovation scaling. First, in outlining the ontological differences between “diffusion” and “scaling”, clear conceptual boundaries are established, which provide clarity and support cross-disciplinary consilience. Second, based on the analysis of articles, eleven common modal contextual factors that influence the outcomes of innovation scaling across contexts and disciplines are presented. Third, an initial theoretical framework of the innovation scaling process is developed, outlining four theoretical propositions. As a fourth contribution, the article establishes a research agenda for the future development of innovation scaling research across many research domains.
Highlights
Innovation constitutes a cross-cutting and multi-disciplinary research field [1,2,3] spanning sustainability, smart cities, management, international development, health, and social welfare literatures
The concept of innovation scaling is of high interest to a wide number of discipli This article sought to address the conceptual ambiguity that exists in the field using a cr disciplinary systematic literature review
As a result of this research, four critical con butions are made to the scaling innovations literature
Summary
Innovation constitutes a cross-cutting and multi-disciplinary research field [1,2,3] spanning sustainability (e.g., sustainable agriculture, green growth, the circular economy, or sustainable urban development), smart cities, management, international development, health, and social welfare literatures. The process of innovation is different from the process of invention [6] in that it describes the (collective) development and implementation of new ideas [4,5,7,8,9,10,11]. Actors’ motivations, as well as contextual drivers and hindrances, are central in determining the ultimate outcome of the innovation process [7]. Once an innovation has been implemented, the processes of diffusion and scaling—which both refer to the longitudinal spreading of innovations—take central importance in determining the innovations’ wider societal impact [4,7,12,13,14,15]
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