Innovation for development: demystifying the buzzword

Giulio Quaggiotto

As the Tales from the Hood blog noted, innovation is en vogue in the development sector. UNICEF’s Executive Board opened last February with a statement on the importance of innovation. USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures is in full steam and the World Bank’s Innovation Practice is often making headlines with initiatives such as open data or Apps for Climate Change.

Challenges such as 3D printing for development are becoming increasingly common practice. Judith Rodin, CEO of the Rockfeller Foundation recently declared to Forbes magazine that we are entering “the third phase of philanthropy,” marked by the effort to “seek out innovation on the ground – sourcing ideas from the crowd – and … scale them as often as we look to create them.” And these are only few examples.

So is innovation just the latest buzzword (fad?) in the development discourse (hold off clicking on the yes button, skeptics out there), or is it something we should embrace in an era of dwindling resources? If the latter, how do we move beyond generic aspirations to walking the talk? (As Duncan Green ironically pointed out “has anyone ever asked you to be less innovative?”)

If we are to take the raging debate over open data as an indicator, implementation challenges – once one moves beyond the buzzwords –  are often non-trivial. For instance, should development organizations follow the stand-alone, skunk works model of innovation (which seems to be the favourite mode so far) or opt for approaches that encourage a closer link to operations? Or, what are effective tactics to embed in the organizational culture an appetite for prototyping, away from the comfort of pilots? What are the criteria to judge whether, say, a challenge or a crowdsourcing initiative successful?

These are some of the questions that are very much on our minds as we begin exploring innovation at UNDP. To help us answer these questions, we recently met with Geoff Mulgan, NESTA’s Chief Executive, Gail Davenport from the World Bank Innovation Practice and Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of the UN Global Pulse to discuss “Demistifying Innovation for Development.”

It would be too hard to do justice to the richness of the discussions in a blog post, so let me just focus here on three ideas that stood out for me:

1. Perhaps the most memorable image came from Geoff’s last slide, reproducing Turner’s famous Fighting Temeraire (above) – the ship depicted as it is about to be broken into scrap. At the end of the day, Geoff noted, innovation is about decommissioning and letting go, no matter how well established or respected the old habit was (NESTA recently published a great report on this subject, The Art of Exit).

This got me thinking: when it comes to development organizations, innovation is often seen as a new “activity” or “initiative.” Would a more useful starting point be to identify what needs to be decommissioned? More generally, how can we get development organizations to embrace “the art of exit”? 

2. Our speakers seemed united on rather than trying to identify “our way to do innovation,” development organizations are better off spending more time understanding and analyzing what is already being done and focusing their efforts in providing project managers with tools and approaches they can choose from (this is consistent with the Kafka Brigade’s principles I blogged about recently). The way that NESTA approaches innovation (below) and research provide a good starting point in this respect. (See: the open book on social innovation or the recently launched Center for Challenges Prizes). By the same token, the Global Pulse research on real time and agile development is a must read for anyone interested in new approaches to crisis management (and real time project monitoring).

But there is an implicit challenge here: how can we bridge the gap between the theoretical work on innovation and development practitioners on the ground? A recent Scidev feature on grassroots innovation has some interesting insights on this. (At UNDP, we are starting to think about how best to address this issue for our staff – suggestions welcome!)