More about our scaling up work
To create a sustainable world it’s vital that the best new ideas are taken up by the mainstream. Key steps on the path to creating significant change are creating pioneering practice – innovative ways of doing things more sustainably - and enabling a tipping point where they are widely copied.
Forum has a growing toolkit for scaling pioneering practice. Bringing together diverse groups to tackle big problems is at the heart of our work. We focus on six main approaches to make this happen:
- Collaboration: We bring people together to solve shared problems that are too big for any one organisation. We think that creating a network of people with different experience and capabilities to work on the same thing improves the chances that it will have an impact. Our Sustainable Shipping Initiative brings together leading organisations from across the maritime sector to plan how it can contribute to – and thrive in – a sustainable future.
- New financial models: We have found that one of the key barriers to scale is financing, so we work with others to develop approaches that can crack access to capital; rebalance financial benefits across the supply chain and balance out benefits between capital and operational expenditure. We have explored Forest Backed Bonds to help local and regional communities profit from maintaining their forest assets rather than selling it off through timber.
- Removing barriers: We work with our partners to identify barriers to change and explore ways to overcome them. We also work with policy makers and lobbying partners to help consolidate change through regulation and changing incentives. When working with Head Teachers we used action research to identify challenges and opportunities that were captured and fed into a national conference.
- Incubation and acceleration: Lots of the big sustainability opportunities are driven by entrepreneurs. We are developing an accelerator process that enables them to scale up and build a network of people doing similar things, helping to make their ideas mainstream. Our Gatecrashing the energy sector project sought out innovative ideas and created new partnerships and helped people work together to make their ideas a reality.
- Capacity building: we work to build the ability of leaders to deliver change in their organisations and systems. Forum is expert at creative learning processes that enables others to take change forward. All our projects aim to handover knowledge and enable others to create more change. Our Masters in Leadership and Sustainable Development has been training the sustainability leaders of the future since 1996. An important part of all our projects is to hand over knowledge and equip others with the skills to create more change. Our Megacities on the Move project explored sustainable urban mobility – how people will live and travel in the cities of the future – and created a toolkit that others could use to apply our work to their concerns.
- Communication: Sharing good practice, engaging stakeholders and communicating widely is a core part of what we do. Letting people know what’s successful and giving them the tools to replicate that is an important route to scale. Through our award winning Farming Futures project we brought farmers together and shared insights, such as how using different feeds could reduce methane emissions from dairy herds.
Through the Forum Lab we learn the lessons from practical work at the cutting edge of system innovation and share them so that we and others can get better at scaling up this work. We also work with individual companies and organisations to help them scale sustainable practice within their businesses.
