This talk was delivered at the Conference on Transformative Innovation Policy hosted by the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (led by Prof Johan Schot from SPRU, University of Sussex), 20-21 September, Pretoria. I was asked to speak on upscaling experimentation, but I ended up trying to link together in a very short 12 minute talk three bodies of recent work at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition that will be published in this next 6-12 months, namely a report called The Weight of Cities: Resource Requirements for Future Urbanization prepared for the International Resource Panel; a book chapter linking experimentation, futuring and transformative urban politics; and our recent work on transdisciplinary research. It is a rather densely pack talk that links the absolutely core arguments of each of these bodies of work.