Design solution that governments want to scale

Most discourse about scaling social impact treats government adoption as an endpoint — something to pursue once a model is proven, funded, and ready to hand off. This session argues that framing has the sequence backwards, and it’s part of why so few interventions actually reach the scale their pilots promise.
The usual diagnosis for why solutions stall before scale is a funding problem: not enough capital, or aid that dries up before durability sets in. Both are real. But they’re not the binding constraint. The deeper issue is that most solutions are never designed to be something a government would actually want to run — they’re designed to be delivered, then handed over, with adoption treated as a downstream ask rather than a starting condition.
Government has its own priorities, budget logic, and political incentives. This might seem obvious to state — yet one doesn’t have to look past the fact that industrial policy is treated as a peripheral concern, if a concern at all, in social impact circles.
Participants will work through:
* Why “prove it works, then get government to adopt it” is a weaker sequence than designing for government adoption as a first-order constraint
* What makes a solution genuinely adoptable by a state actor
* Where practitioners in the room have tried to hand off to government, and what broke down when adoption was treated as a later-stage ask
* What it would mean to treat enabling government’s capacity as the actual theory of change, not a stretch goal layered on top of one