The major challenge for the world in our times is sustainable development. For this we need pioneers, who are developing and using innovative solutions on a local and regional scale in an experimental setting, for instance in so-called Living Labs. A very important issue for these pioneers is how to become succesful, in a way that these innovations will scale up and will spread out to other parts of the world. This is the main question of the PhD research of Harm van den Heiligenberg. In his research he will focus on pioneers in several regions of Europe.