Innovation isn't scarce in cities, but what they do lack is time and energy dedicated to helping it flourish, argue Amelia Kuch and Joshua Stehr from NetZeroCities' partners Dark Matter Labs. Based on a conversation with Anette Olovborn, an expert who has worked for more than ten years with innovation and change in municipalities and city networks, they unpack the persistent misconceptions about scaling that shape policy design, funding, and governance, and suggest how cities can change this approach.
Almost every European project aimed at cities includes work on citizen engagement.
However, the risk is that a process presented as collaborative only collects opinions, leading to disaffection even among the most motivated participants and making it harder to involve them in the next project.
And repeating a good practice over periods longer than a single project makes it possible to turn engagement into behaviour.
The highest level of engagement is reached when engagement itself becomes invisible. Consider a project that aims to shift urban travel from cars to bicycles. At the beginning the city has to persuade, reward and remind. If the change succeeds, over time residents take the bicycle without weighing the alternatives because it has become the ordinary way of moving around the city. At that point no campaign is needed any more, and the behaviour the project set out to produce sustains itself.
Across Europe, cities continue to test innovative climate solutions like low-traffic zones retrofitting public buildings, reforming school meals, and even redesigning procurement rules.
Yet, despite the dedication to building knowledge and sharing experience of what works, taking successful solutions from a small trial and applying them on a larger scale remains too slow to meet our climate goals. In a time when we desperately need to shift away from the current trajectory of a +2.8 degree global warming, rapid exponential scaling of sustainable practices and solutions is essential. So, what’s the problem?
Our colleague Anette Olovborn says scaling up is not about sharing more ideas, but “enabling more cities to act upon them.” Below, we highlight five common misconceptions when thinking about scaling and finally present some ideas to help avoid them.
Misconception 1: Sharing knowledge leads to scaling
A deeply-rooted assumption in public innovation policy is that sharing knowledge will lead to scaling. City representatives return from conferences inspired, motivated, and full of ideas – and yet implementation rarely follows.
“Everyone comes home saying ‘Oh, we should really do that,’” says Olovborn, but then it doesn’t happen.
The reality is that knowledge is rarely the bottleneck. Cities know about good solutions. They’ve seen the presentations. They have the reports. What they lack is capacity, a mandate, and support to adopt new solutions and adapt them to their context.
In practice, this means they need:
- someone with dedicated time to lead the change
- an organisation with the capacity to change and adopt new practices
- a community of peers to support them when they encounter resistance
- funders who recognise that adopting and adapting solutions to each organisation’s own context is as valuable as invention.
This is not a motivation problem and often not even primarily a finance problem. It is a structural misunderstanding of what scaling actually requires, which is organisational change.
Misconception 2: Pioneers are responsible for scaling
“It’s never enough if you only have someone telling you about the excellent solutions that need to be scaled. Someone also needs to be willing and able to adopt them,” says Olovborn.
Scaling, she argues, works like communication: it requires a sender and a receiver. Most policy instruments focus almost exclusively on the sender (‘the pioneer’), while ignoring the receiving end (‘the adopter’).
Cities that want to adopt solutions need resources and a managed process to succeed. Motivating colleagues, securing political decisions and management support, reallocating budgets, freeing up time, learning new practices and letting go of old ones – without secured time and explicit support for this adoption and adaption work, scaling stalls.
Misconception 3: Scaling only needs money
Debates about funding for scaling often focus on large investment needs. While investment can be necessary, Olovborn highlights a more basic constraint: “Sometimes it’s not at all about the money. It’s about calendar time and mental space.”
From a policy design perspective, this points to a mismatch between what is funded (projects and infrastructure) and what scaling actually requires (time for facilitation and change leadership).
“If you don’t have that calendar space, then the big investments won’t happen, or lead to limited results, because there is no one there to lead the change, and no one with mental space to learn new methods,” says Olovborn.
Misconception 4: Scaling is fast and easy once a solution exists
“An implementation of something new always has to go through a change process in an organization. Many great ideas don’t survive that change process”, says Olovborn.
“Even when solutions are simple, proven, and clearly beneficial, adoption is far from automatic.”
This is illustrated by an example from Sweden, where school kitchens reduced electricity load by up to 50% and energy use by 20% by changing cooking behaviours, rather than investing in new equipment. However, despite clear benefits and minimal cost, adoption remains partial and slow.
Misconception 5: Innovation must always be new
Many funding instruments assume innovation arrives through novelty. As a result, projects are designed to invent something new rather than adopt what already works and adapt it to their own situation, which rewards pioneers while leaving adopters unsupported.
Another assumption about innovation is that it should lead to impact on a large scale. Yet large-scale transitions do not happen through a handful of isolated cutting-edge pilots.
“The change comes when many people and organisations shift from one norm to another or one business model to another,” says Olovborn.
These two assumptions are conflicting. If innovation is defined by scaling up impact, how can that impact be achieved without supporting the replication and adoption of proven solutions? The current system funds invention but not spreading it.
What does this mean for policymakers and funders?
As Anette Olovborn puts it, “The good solutions are already there that can bring us quite far in the transition to a life within planetary boundaries. Let’s implement them, rapidly and at scale.”
Taken together, the misconceptions point to a systemic blind spot in current transition governance. Policy frameworks heavily invest in experimentation and knowledge production, while underinvesting in adoption, facilitation, and organizational change.
“If we could invest time and some funding in supporting the adapters and adopters, the followers, and create continuous accelerators where cities work together on implementing solutions, then we would really get scaling rolling,” Says Olovborn.
This does not require entirely new programmes but supporting innovation to include:
- Acknowledging that scaling is inherent in innovation – no scaling, no large-scale impact
- Recognising that scaling is a process of the adopters, not an event of the pioneers
- Understanding that scaling requires leadership on the adoption and adaptation of solutions to local contexts
- Support and funding also for adopters, not only pioneers
- Peer-to-peer implementation networks
- Resources for adopters that free up time and capacity to drive the change
What does this mean for implementing solutions that have worked well elsewhere?
Successful implementation therefore requires cities to:
- Recognise that there is no easy copy/paste solution that ‘just happens’. Implementation includes adaptation of solutions to local contexts and adoption by the organisation, which requires consistent work and attention.
- Dedicate resources and freed-up calendar time in the organisation to lead and manage the change, and to support colleagues through the process of learning, adjusting and unlearning obsolete practices.
- Build relationships with other cities and partners that have done or are in the process of doing similar implementations. By sharing practical experiences, learnings and tools with each other, you become more effective and efficient in your implementations.
- Support others in their implementation and become part of an exponential scaling of good practices.
The 22-month Enabling City Transformation Programme is designed to help overcome systemic barriers and test innovations for city‑wide transformation. Mission cities can apply until 3 December 2026.
