Economic development projects often struggle when it comes to scaling up the impacts of their successful interventions in order to reach a large number of people. Questions about how scaling up is done in a successful way have been asked in connection to various types of development interventions without finding a successful and definitive answer.

More recently, it is often said that scaling up happens quasi automatically or at least with much less effort when the interventions of a project are ‘systemic’. This can happen in economic development projects by actors copying new business models or when new business models in a specific market also benefit connected markets in a positive way. In the Making Markets Work for the Poor (M4P) literature, these phenomena are called breadth and depth of crowding in, respectively. At the same time, the M4P literature acknowledges that crowding in might only in particular cases happen by itself and needs further efforts by the projects, such as for example dissemination of information about the new and successful implementation of business models. It is then anticipated that companies learn about the successes of their peers and will try to imitate them and with that the change will proliferate through the system. Again, it is often stressed that this will only happen if the introduced changes are ‘systemic’. But what does systemic mean in this regard? There are three important aspects at play here. Continue reading →