Responsible innovation to address grand societal challenges has become the raison d'être of international organizations, such as the United Nations. Although these entities are established to act responsibly, they struggle to innovate. Acknowledging the tensions of this unique context, this study applies an inductive research methodology drawing on eight case studies of intrapreneurial initiatives in socially oriented organizations. The initiatives originated in country offices and scaled either organically (country-by-country) or strategically (via headquarters). This distinguishes two ways how the initiatives mitigate different responsible innovation tensions to foster competence development, structural alignment, and mission stretch. The findings add to the literatures on responsible innovation and intrapreneurship in large, complex organizations by uncovering the boundary conditions of non-profit intrapreneurship, its tensions, and its scaling processes. This study builds theory that intrapreneurial initiatives can foster digital transformation and contribute to the development of an organizational capability for responsible innovation via organizational imprinting.

Digital solutions are increasingly used to address “wicked problems” that are locally embedded but require global approaches. Scaling these solutions internationally is imperative for their success, but to date we know little about this process. Using a qualitative case study methodology, our paper analyzes how four digital solutions driven by the United Nations are built and how they scale internationally. These solutions address wicked problems through artificial intelligence, blockchain, and geospatial mapping, and are embedded in networks of partners which evolve during scaling to create unique ecosystem roles and configurations. We identify different ecosystem roles and find that the specific properties of digital solutions – modularity, generativity and affordances – enable either adaptation or replication during scaling. Building on these insights, we derive a typology of four different types of international scaling, which vary in their ecosystem versatility (how the ecosystem changes across locations) and the local adaptation of the application (the problems the solution addresses). This study presents a new way to examine the replication and adaptation dilemma for ecosystems and extends internationalization theory to the digital world.

While intrapreneurship and scaling are key themes in the International Business (IB) discussion, our research is the first to show how these concepts manifest in the context of the United Nations and how learnings from IB may be transferred. The United Nations (UN) organizations are tasked with solving the world’s pressing and difficult problems. These organizations are major players in international governance and are characterized by bureaucratic, globally dispersed and politically driven structures, but are hardly ever considered in IB research. The UN organizations are struggling to create innovative approaches to fulfil their core missions in today’s digital world and evidence shows that intrapreneurship and scaling innovation will be critical for transformation.

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This Point of View article discusses the implications of different organization designs for solving the Grand Challenges. In line with this Special Issue, we view “organization designs as problem-solving systems”. However, we are skeptical that contemporary organization designs indeed “foster collective action that is needed to solve these grand challenges”. We outline different organization design choices for solving the grand challenges and provide a categorization of how selected types of organizations are fit to respond to these based on organizational goals (social–profit), organizational scale (local–global), and organizational decision making (agile–bureaucratic). In conclusion, we offer ideas on how to harness complementarities in different organization designs to develop collaborative ecosystem solutions.

This article summarizes my award-winning dissertation on innovation for transforming the United Nations (UN) to solve the grand challenges in a technologically evolving world. It answers: how do the processes of managing, structuring and scaling innovation impact international organizations and the fulfilment of their missions? Findings show that innovative initiatives lead to the development of responsible innovation capacity, that scaling digital solutions for wicked problems requires global/local ecosystem actors to take on new roles in each location, and that innovation units create value through relationships not owned by one party. These contributions exhibit the cross-sectoral potential for delivering global impact through innovation. It also shows that IB scholars have the frameworks and tools to move beyond traditional contexts to address real problems in the global economy.