A joint research project by the Civic Machines Lab (TUM), WWF, and the IFIN Network
Turning innovation into lasting impact
NGOs working on some of the world's most pressing challenges are full of innovative ideas. What's often missing is the infrastructure to turn those ideas into lasting, systemic change. This five-year research project — funded by the VW Foundation — is working to close that gap.
In collaboration with WWF's Global Innovation Team and the Civic Machines Lab at TUM Think Tank, we are developing a validated framework and AI-powered coaching tool to help NGO project teams design, scale, and measure innovation more effectively.
From pilots to transformational impact
Across the NGO sector, dedicated teams are designing new approaches, running pilots, and testing solutions in some of the most complex environments imaginable. Yet transformational impact at scale remains the exception rather than the rule.
Promising projects stall. Successful pilots fail to spread. And the knowledge of what actually works stays locked inside individual teams rather than becoming shared intelligence across the sector.
What we are doing
Why this matters
In collaboration with WWF's Global Innovation Team and TUM Think Tank, we are developing a validated framework and AI-powered coaching tool to help NGO project teams design, scale, and measure innovation more effectively.
Good knowledge about innovation should not only be available to those with the right connections or resources. This project is designed to make it available to NGO project teams anywhere in the world — in a form that is practical, accessible, and helpful for day-to-day decision-making.
The NGO sector faces a set of interconnected challenges that this project directly addresses.
Scaling is consistently treated as an afterthought rather than being built in from the beginning.
Impact measurement tends to track outputs rather than whether real, systemic change is actually happening.
And underlying both is a more fundamental problem: the gap between knowing what good practice looks like and being able to apply it consistently – under pressure, complex environments, and with limited resources.