A Systemic Route to Scalability

Humanity’s biggest challenges manifest across complex, interwoven systems, creating problems that are intricate, interlaced - and impossible to solve in isolation. Addressing them demands the convergence of scientific disciplines with the insights and expertise of multistakeholder communities—leaders, researchers, companies, investors, policymakers, and citizens alike. 

At the Leonardo Centre, our ambition is to ensure our work propagates into systemic impact at a global scale. This is why our research begins with understanding how change travels through systems—and continues with designing how it scales. 

Scalability is considered from day one. Our Agenda expands through four mutually reinforcing engines that enable systemic impact to move, grow, and embed across the world: 

• Digital & AI infrastructures that scale behavioural intelligence, automate verification, and support impact markets at low cost. 

• Global networks and coalitions that connect leaders, companies, investors, policymakers, and communities into shared action. 

• Finance as a catalyst, shifting from ESG reporting to outcome-based investment and impact monetisation. 

• Replicable processes and Lab structures that can be deployed across sectors and regions with consistent quality. 

Together, these engines create a systemic route to scalability—a framework that turns research into real-world transformation, and ensures the Agenda not only evolves locally, but can accelerate globally.  

The Leonardo Chemicals Decarbonisation Lab currently stands as the most advanced expression of our systemic and scalable approach, operating at the frontier where scientific innovation meets industry-level transformation. It integrates cutting edge chemistry, behavioural intelligence, and multistakeholder collaboration to redesign entire value chains—not just improve isolated processes.  

By connecting researchers, industrial partners, financiers, and policymakers around shared data, digital infrastructures, and real-world deployment pathways, the lab demonstrates how low-carbon solutions can propagate through complex systems and reach global scale. Its work exemplifies how rigorous research, interdisciplinary methods, and coalition-driven action can combine to accelerate the transition toward a truly sustainable chemical economy. 

What works, what doesn’t and where the overlaps are, is a core part of our learning experience – highlighting what we can do better. It will inform the development of our other labs, most notably Regenerative Fashion and Impact Finance.