Scaling Innovations for Maximum Impact: Lessons from the LEARN to Scale Workshop

May 27, 2025 | By Keith Heumiller

This month, the LEARN Network launched its virtual LEARN to Scale Workshop series, convening a national community of educators, researchers, and innovators committed to bringing effective, evidence-based educational products to scale.

The opening workshop, held May 1 and led by a panel of research, development, and marketing experts, offered participants a broad range of information, resources, and real-world scaling success stories to help developers build and grow impactful educational innovations.

Defining Scale in Education

Rebecca Griffiths, Postsecondary Learning Research Director with Digital Promise, opened the workshop by unpacking what “scaling” really means, stressing that scale is less about raw numbers and more about generating lasting, sustainable impact for the districts, schools, and student populations that an innovation is designed to support.

“What’s really important about the process is that [scaling] is also about building organizational capacity, securing stakeholder buy-in, and ensuring long-term relevance.”

Griffiths stressed that researchers and developers should carefully consider their intended user base, developing a scaling and marketing plan that accounts for their real-world settings, resource limitations, regulatory demands, and the products and programs they are currently using.

She also cautioned innovators against the idea that open educational resources (OER) are more likely to scale, simply because they’re free.

“When we put out OER materials, we tend to think of it as a free beer. You give it to somebody, they drink it, they go home, and everyone’s happy. It actually can be more like a free puppy. Because, when a district decides to adopt an open education resource, they still have to consider how it’s going to be maintained, how it’s going to be updated, how it integrates with their technology infrastructure.”

The I-A-T Framework: From Invention to Impact

Next, Kerry Friedman, Director of the LEARN Network, introduced the Invent-Apply-Transition (I-A-T) framework, developed at SRI. This systemic approach supports product and program developers in embedding scaling strategies throughout the research and development lifecycle. The stages of the I-A-T framework are:

  • Invent: Understand a need and design a user-focused solution.
  • Apply: Refine the product and align it with the broader market’s needs.
  • Transition: Plan for sustainable scale through pathways such as launching an enterprise, securing ongoing grants, or pursuing licensing or acquisition.

Describing the framework, Friedman noted the importance of preparing for scale early.

Even if you’re not launching a company tomorrow, you need to be thinking now about what capacity you’ll need – the people, partnerships, infrastructure – to get there.”

Friedman also shared the LEARN to Scale Toolkit, which includes an extensive library of videos, templates, protocols, and planning resources designed to support innovators at all stages of their design and scaling journey.

“It’s a really great resource to use, allowing you to identify your on-ramp – where you are in your research and development process – to figure out which stage to get started with,” she said.

Stories of Scaling: STARI and Inq-ITS

The workshop featured leaders from two successful educational programs who described their journeys from design and development to scale. Margaret Troyer, Director of Literacy at the SERP Institute, shared the evolution of STARI, a Tier 2 reading intervention for students in grades 6 and up.

Troyer emphasized designing for scalability from the start.

“STARI was designed to be usable by the average teacher. We didn’t have grad students teaching it first and then try to retrofit it; it had to work in real classrooms, from day one.

She shared how STARI’s professional learning model shifted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. What began as an emergency pivot to asynchronous online training eventually became a core feature of the product’s scalability. Later, administrators in New York City requested a live virtual training version – something STARI initially resisted.

“At first, we tried to talk them out of it,” Troyer said. “We said, ‘Six-hour Zoom trainings? No one wants that.’ But they insisted, so we redesigned the training. The uptake was incredible. By mid-year, they were full with waitlists. Sometimes it’s easier for teachers to show up at a set time than find time for asynchronous learning.”

Janice Gobert, CEO of Apprendis and a professor at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, told the story of Inq-ITS, a patented AI-powered science inquiry platform that grew out of a research lab and has been used across all 50 U.S. states and 12 countries.

Gobert credited the program’s success to early funding and strategic partnerships.

“We used SBIR [Small Business Innovation Research] grants to build and test features, and research grants to validate them. The product evolved organically, bit by bit, based on what was ready and what schools needed.”

Gobert emphasized that growth wasn’t linear, requiring the team to balance research ideals with business constraints.

“We had to figure out what was a need-to-have versus a nice-to-have feature,” she said.

Explore more scaling success stories in the LEARN Network’s Stories of Scaling series.

What’s Next

Join us for the next LEARN to Scale Workshop – Bringing Educational Innovations to Market: A Step-By-Step Approach for Researchers and Developers – on Thursday, June 26, at 3 pm ET. Research and marketing experts will host an interactive discussion centered on marketing strategy and market readiness.

Participants will learn a proven, step-by-step approach to building a go-to-market strategy that conveys the right message to the right people, at the right time, across the right channels. Through guided exercises, participants will learn about tools and frameworks to apply a market-first mindset by mapping their target audiences’ priorities and challenges, defining their product’s packaging, and crafting compelling positioning and messaging that capture their product’s unique value.

All LEARN to Scale Workshops are free and open to the public.

“We hope this series helps bring your work to life in new, sustainable ways,” Friedman said.

Learn more and register for the June 26 workshop here.

  • Watch the full recording of the May 1 LEARN to Scale Workshop on YouTube.
  • Download a transcript of the workshop here.

Tags: Education technology Innovation Research & Developers