Opinion: The Science of replication – Turning a buzzword into a robust method for decision support
By Loriana Paolucci, ISINNOVA
Facilitating the shift from abstract guesswork to actionable insights for smarter innovation transfer
“In the landscape of EU research and innovation projects, replication has become a widely valued concept. Cities, companies, and policymakers are increasingly expected to promote the uptake of successful solutions tested in one place and ensure their effective application elsewhere.
“Yet replicability is rarely straightforward. Each setting has its own governance arrangements, financial frameworks, infrastructure assets, and socio-cultural dynamics, which require replication to be backed by assessments rather than assumptions.
“As demands grow to move from pilot-level to systemic change, a recurring issue emerges: how do we know whether an innovation can truly succeed in a different setting? Without a structured approach, replication risks being treated as an aspiration rather than a process. Promising ideas might lose momentum if place-sensitive features are not properly considered — be it regulations, market readiness, institutional capacity, or public acceptance.
“Over the past decade, within the EU R&I frameworks, replication has increasingly become a recognised priority. Many research initiatives have invested in sharing best practices, producing reports on lessons learned, and promoting peer exchanges between more experienced and less experienced contexts. These activities have created real value, spreading know-how, building trust, and encouraging a culture of knowledge-sharing across Europe.
“Yet one crucial question often remains unanswered: under what conditions can a solution proven in one place succeed elsewhere? Exchanges and case studies are essential first steps, but they do not always provide decision-makers with the systematic evidence needed to decide how to adapt and adopt an innovation. Replication requires not only inspiration but also structured methods of assessing feasibility in different scenarios. This is why several EU funding programs, from Horizon Europe to the Mission on Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, explicitly require projects to demonstrate how their solutions can be replicated elsewhere. These policy frameworks make replication a core expectation, further underlining the need for approaches that are both systematic and quantitative.
“Smart city initiatives, for example, have shown that even when technical performance is proven, adoption can stall if governance is fragmented or if funding is unavailable. In energy transition, policy tools that work well in one country may need significant tweaks in another to address differences in infrastructure or legal frameworks. These mismatches are not failures of the solutions themselves, but reminders of how strongly replication depends on context.
“This gap — between ambition and feasibility — remains a recurring challenge for spreading innovation. What has been missing is a reliable, transparent, and, above all, quantitative way to study replication and, through more than a decade of work on European projects, one conclusion has become clear: to move beyond aspirations, replication needs a method that translates complexity into numbers, rankings, and actionable insights.
“This is what led ISINNOVA to the development of INSPIRE™. Rather than presenting replication as a yes/no decision, INSPIRETM studies replicability across several dimensions—technological, institutional, socio-cultural, environmental, economic, and other case-specific ones. It collects information both about the solution itself and about the context where it could be applied. The interaction between the two is then mapped in replicability diagrams, which assign each solution a 0–100% score that can be aggregated into an overall ranking.
“The added value is twofold. Firstly, replication potential is quantified, enabling policymakers and stakeholders to compare options in a clear and transparent way. Secondly, the drivers of high or low scores are made explicit, highlighting the barriers that need to be addressed or the enablers that can be leveraged. As a result, strategies can be refined, investments better targeted, and solutions adapted rather than simply transferred.
“By framing replication as a measurable, data-driven process, INSPIRETM helps bridge a longstanding gap. Although it cannot promise certainty, since contexts remain complex and dynamic, INSPIRETM offers a structured way to reduce risks, anticipate challenges, and make informed choices. In this way, replication shifts from being an aspiration to becoming a practical method for guiding innovation towards systemic and lasting change.
Loriana Paolucci – Senior Researcher, ISINNOVA – Institute of Studies for the Integration of Systems (Rome, Italy)