By Amanda Fixsen, Karen Blase and Dean Fixsen
2. Karen Blase (biography)
3. Dean Fixsen (biography)
What is involved in effective scaling up of innovations in order to achieve social impact? Here are four best practices, drawn from our experience in scaling up human services innovations and programs for children and families. We also provide definitions of the key terms used.
1. Understand the target audiences
Effectively scaling innovations first requires attention to defining the denominator, or population of interest for the scale-up effort, as well as the numerator, or the number of children and families who are receiving the innovation with fidelity and good outcomes.
2. Purposeful design leads to high-fidelity use
Human service systems are legacy systems comprised of an accumulation of fragments of past mandates, good ideas, beliefs, and ways of work that evolved over many decades as legislators, leaders, and staff have come and gone. These legacy systems can be fragmented, siloed and inefficient.
To realize social impact, organizations and systems need to be designed, or re-designed, on purpose to produce and sustain high-fidelity use of effective innovations.
3. Focus on scaling proven programs
Attempts to scale ineffective or harmful programs are a waste of time, money and opportunity, so programs must reliably produce positive outcomes for the population of interest.
Given that we are focused on scaling interaction-based programs that require service providers to use the program within a larger systems context, there is a great deal of complexity involved in “scaling up.” It may be difficult to assess the quality of the program for the children and families who are receiving it, as good fidelity measures for programs are not common.
4. Ensure adequate implementation capacity
There needs to be a focus on developing local site implementation capacity, so that each site using the program can sustain it over time.
Scaled use of an effective program depends first on scaling implementation capacity to support, sustain and improve high quality replications of the program. There is complexity inherent in maintaining and increasing the numerator, as the number of recipients of the program cannot continue to increase without attention to sustaining the quality of the program by those already providing it.
Implementation teams are one key factor in supporting programs at scale, helping to ensure sustainability of the program, and maintaining local implementation capacity. One team alone cannot support a program at scale; it would be like one teacher supporting all classrooms in a school. Given this, teams that support implementation must be present at multiple levels to support high quality use of the program over time.
It truly is a whole systems effort that is required to effectively scale programs.
Conclusions
The good news is that transformation of systems may require only small changes. It has been shown that transformed systems retain approximately 80 percent of the original system.
In sum, developing local implementation capacity and implementation teams may be the way forward if we want to ensure high quality implementation of effective programs into service delivery systems. Our experience intersects with and also differs from that reported in the recent blog post Scaling up amidst complexity, by Ann Larson.
What has your experience been with scaling up, especially in developing local implementation capacity and implementation teams at multiple levels?
To find out more:
Fixsen, D. L., Blase, K. A. and Fixsen, A. A. M. (2017). Scaling effective innovations. Criminology and Public Policy, 16, 2: 487-499.
A previous version of this blog post was published by Gary Community Investments on the Shared Knowledge website at: [Moderator update – In November 2025, this link was no longer available and so the link structure has been left in place but the active link deleted: garycommunity.org/article/best-practices-scaling-effective-interventions].
Biography: Amanda Fixsen, Ph.D. is the director of implementation at Invest in Kids in Denver, Colorado, USA. With a background in applied behavior analysis, social work research, and implementation science, she pursues her interest in how human and health services can be effectively implemented and scaled up in real-world contexts.
Biography: Karen Blase, Ph.D. is emerita senior scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She is co-founder of the National Implementation Research Network, co-authored ‘Implementation Research: A Synthesis of the Literature’, and led efforts to operationalize and replicate implementation and scaling methods in human services.
Biography: Dean Fixsen, Ph.D. is co-founder of the National Implementation Research Network based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. He is also president of the Global Implementation Initiative. In 2005, he co-authored ‘Implementation Research: A Synthesis of the Literature’ and has been active in developing implementation science as a professional discipline.