Many countries, regions and education districts in the world have experimented with models of one-device-per-student as an enabler of new or effective pedagogies supported by mobile technologies. Researchers have also designed innovations or interventions for possible adoption by schools or for informal learning. Of critical interest to the community is the question of how the more successful of these top-down or bottom-up models or innovations can proliferate to more usage, adoption and adaptation across levels of the education system. This paper describes a research programme that demonstrates how to make successful research innovations count in practice and that delineates what types of educational R&D involving scaling need to take place to make the critical link to impacting practice. We do this in the context of one such curricular innovation in a Singapore school that moves through the various phases to where the innovation is becoming an integral part of routine classroom practices.