Innovation at scale: What's working and what's holding it back

A breakthrough that reaches one person is a discovery. A breakthrough that reaches millions is progress.

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The Forum's Women's Health Innovation Radar, developed with the Global Alliance for Women’s Health, the Kearney Health Institute, the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Leap, maps what happens when the pipeline between scientific discovery and real-world impact breaks down at scale.

Across 10 high-burden conditions, only 20% of programme research funding is women-focused, and more than half of that concentrates in just two conditions: ovarian cancer and menopause.

The consequences show up downstream: Ischaemic heart disease, one of the leading causes of death in women globally, has among the lowest levels of women-focused research funding in the entire analysis.

UpLink, the Forum's early-stage innovation initiative, surveyed more than 200 start-ups and ran over 60 dialogues with investors, corporates and policy-makers to understand what separates ventures that scale from those that stall in the pilot phase.

Four lessons emerged and across all of them, the limiting factor is rarely the technology. The survey points instead to institutional conditions: procurement barriers, misaligned incentives and the organizational readiness of the businesses and cities these start-ups are trying to sell into.

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Tech breakthroughs are everywhere but translating them into positive results - at scale, across industries and economies - is the harder, less-told story.

This tracker brings together the Forum's latest research, data and expert perspectives on how innovation actually moves from lab to life: the strategies, the barriers, the proof points, and the questions that still need answering.

We'll be updating through the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, People's Republic of China (23–25 June 2026).

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The Forum's second Technology Convergence report documents a meaningful shift taking place across sectors: they aren't just using a single advanced technology but rather generating the most impact by combining them.

In healthcare, for instance, the pairing of robotics with AI and advanced sensing is improving surgical precision while reducing pressure on overstretched care teams. And in manufacturing, digital twins combined with robotics are enabling real-time iteration on product designs before hardware is involved.

The report finds that eight domains are converging simultaneously. Track them in the Forum's first Tech Maturity Index:

Or, read about the specific industry examples from the report's authors.

The Forum's monthly AI digest rounds up the most significant developments across the AI landscape.

This month's edition covers the Forum's new Technology Convergence report, the EU's updated code of practice on AI-generated content (expected to take effect in August), and the latest on open model collaboration among leading AI companies.