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The world has made great progress in addressing some of the globe'€™s challenges, but we have much more to do -€“ only possible by developing and scaling new technological and social science interventions. Over the past three decades, we have applauded many breakthrough research, design and technology innovations, and more recently we have witnessed an encouraging commitment to strengthen health, education, finance and other systems to support reaching "the last mile"€ of development. With this barbell approach, however, we have often ignored, misunderstood and under-invested in the critical, tough and unsexy challenges crossing the middle of the value chain -- innovation's valley of death: product and system adaptation and evaluation; evidence generation and design validation; formal or informal regulatory approval and registration; and the appropriate design, introduction and optimization of the intervention'€™s uptake of before markets, governments or other systems can truly take them to scale. This class will use an inter-disciplinary approach to look at variety of economic, scientific, and systemic factors that pull innovation forward, that push it from behind, and often to the world''s detriment block its successful implementation and scaling. Grounding the work on both traditional and emerging research and theories on social change and development, we would apply real world experiences and several important case studies in order to examine the way good ideas get stuck advancing to real solutions, and how innovations fail to scale to make any meaningful impact on outcomes that matter. We will also examine the root causes for these challenges. More important, we will focus on innovations and methodologies that have overcome these barriers, where we have witnessed both simple and complex innovations reach literally millions or even billions of lives. The seminar will involve a combination of lectures, case studies, visiting lecturers, and a project tackling a particular aspect of a specific problem. While the aperture on innovation theory would be quite wide across multiple sectors and models, the focused case examples would be derived from global health innovations. Our goal is to help the next generation of social innovation leaders think more about some of the mistakes of the past, and lessons for the future, and new ways of approaching old problems, all from a practitioner'€'s point of view.