In 2025 ISEAL Innovations Fund commissioned research into how voluntary sustainability systems go about scaling innovative practices. This study explored how to close the 'pilot-to-scale' gap. It identifies six main pathways through which sustainability innovations can scale. These include integrating an innovation into public policy or industry standards, embedding it within organisational operations, expanding it through partnerships or open platforms, driving uptake through market incentives, or embedding it in widely used digital systems and platforms. 

Successful scaling efforts often combine several of these routes—for example, a digital tool may start as an open platform, gain traction through market demand, then be adopted by standards bodies, and finally integrated into public policy.

Attached is the summary report from this research, published in March 2026. Those interested in reading the full report can reach out to fund@isealalliance.org.