Community-based propagation to scale up educational innovations in sustainability

Many high-quality educational innovations are freely available, and some are known to motivate evidence-based climate and sustainability action. Typically, efforts to propagate educational innovations rely on outreach and word-of-mouth diffusion, but these approaches tend to achieve little. We develop and analyse a dynamic computational model to understand why and to test other propagation strategies. Our analysis reveals that outreach has limited impact and does little to accelerate word-of-mouth adoption under conditions typical in higher education. Instead, we find that community-based propagation can rapidly accelerate adoption, as is also shown by a small number of successful real-world scaling efforts. This approach supports a community of ‘ambassadors’, facilitating and rewarding their sharing the innovation with potential adopters. Community-based propagation can generate exponential growth in adopters, rapidly outpacing outreach and word-of-mouth propagation. Without it, we are unlikely to rapidly scale the educational innovations needed to build urgently needed capacity in sustainability.