The Adoption Gap: Why Proven Solutions Keep Failing to Travel
About the Session
The sector has become very good at generating solutions. It has not yet become good at getting them used.
Across global health, climate technology, education, agriculture, and development finance, the same pattern keeps appearing. A solution is developed, tested, and validated. Evidence accumulates. And then it stalls. Not because it does not work, but because everything that sits between proof and practice turns out to be harder than the innovation itself.
That gap has a name: adoption. And it may be the most underinvested problem in the sector.
The barriers are rarely dramatic. Procurement systems cannot absorb something unfamiliar. Regulators move slower than innovators. The people expected to use a solution were not part of designing it. Investors are comfortable funding breakthroughs but not the slower, harder work of embedding them into systems. Governments inherit evidence-based policies that never translate into sustained changes in how services are actually delivered. And the organizations closest to implementation carry the burden of adoption without the resources or authority to drive it.
The result is a permanent pilot economy. Proven technologies ready to scale but stuck. Programs that demonstrate results in one context and fail to travel. Innovations that find their way into reports but not into routine practice. In climate technology alone, the deployment gap between what is ready and what is actually being used runs to hundreds of billions of dollars. The pattern is no different in health, education, or agriculture.
So if adoption is the real bottleneck, why does so little attention, financing, and institutional responsibility flow toward it? Who owns the adoption problem? Which actors have the mandate, the incentives, and the relationships to close the gap between a validated solution and a system that uses it routinely? And what would it take to treat adoption not as the natural consequence of a good idea, but as a discipline in its own right, something to be designed for, financed, and held accountable from the beginning?
Discussion Group Leaders
Afua Basoah is Co-Founder & General Partner at Fern Capital Group, advancing investment that translates scientific and healthcare innovation into scalable solutions and routine care.
Sonja Betschart is Co-Founder and Co-Pilot at WeRobotics, advancing locally owned technology solutions and equitable collaboration to strengthen the use of technology for social good.
Nadir Shams is Co-Founder at The Friends of Pakistan - Society and Fund, advancing evidence-based and scalable approaches to poverty reduction and sustainable development.
Lou Leonard is Inaugural Dean, School of Climate, Environment, and Society at Clark University, advancing interdisciplinary approaches to climate, environmental policy, energy, conservation, water, and Indigenous rights.
What to Expect
A candid, cross-sector working conversation grounded in real examples of solutions that stalled and adoptions that succeeded. Participants will bring their own experience of where the gap appears in their work and what conditions made the difference. The discussion will push beyond diagnosis toward the practical: what needs to change in how solutions are designed, financed, and handed off if more of what works is actually going to get used.
Who This Is For
This session is for investors, philanthropists, innovators, implementers, government partners, and development practitioners who have watched promising solutions fail to travel and want a more honest conversation about why, and what it would take to build the infrastructure that makes adoption possible at scale.
What You Will Get Out of It
A cross-sector picture of where and why the adoption gap appears, drawing on experience across climate technology, health, education, agriculture, and development
A clearer understanding of the institutional and financial conditions that either enable or block adoption at scale
Practical perspectives on what ecosystem readiness actually requires and who is responsible for building it
New thinking on investor and funder responsibility beyond the initial proof of concept
A sharper set of questions to take back to your own work about whether you are financing innovation or financing adoption