Background: Cities are increasingly investing in sustainable innovation to address urban sustainability challenges that aim to transform urban systems and infrastructures while strengthening their resilience to global climate change. These local responses to global challenges are often characterized by collaborative approaches involving businesses, local governments, and non-governmental organizations, focusing on experimentation with sustainable innovation in urban living lab environments. Such environments are designed to develop, test, validate, and implement novel technological solutions to address specific urban sustainability challenges in a controlled setting. Although experimental living lab settings are instrumental in nurturing and validating innovation, transforming urban systems and infrastructures requires the large-scale application of sustainable innovation beyond the experimental contexts in which they were initially developed. This paper explores the heterogeneous dimensions that influence the upscaling of sustainable innovations from experimentation in cities. Methods: To explore these dimensions, we present the Upscaling Canvas, which is a theoretically grounded and practically informed instrument for assessing the readiness of critical dimensions required for upscaling of sustainable innovation in cities. It has five central dimensions: (a) the urban transformation strategy, (b) the presence of economic drivers, (c) local regulation and policy frameworks, (d) the degree of stakeholder engagement, and (e) the adoption of integrative governance structures. Results: We illustrate the Upscaling Canvas through a longitudinal case study based on evidence from an experimentation project focused on sustainable urban innovation in Amsterdam that was funded by the European Union under the Urban Innovative Actions program between 2018 and 2022. Conclusion: Our case study highlights the complexities of scaling sustainable innovation beyond experimental settings in a holistic way. It also demonstrates how the Upscaling Canvas enables policymakers and practitioners to assess the readiness of cities to progress from experimentation to upscaling in urban system transformation.
Winden et al. (Wed,) studied this question.