4. The development innovation process

Abstract

Successful innovative organisations are those that can identify and direct resources towards specific challenges and opportunities; support and facilitate efforts to search for, invent and develop new ideas; invest resources in implementing and evaluating innovative approaches; and have dedicated resources and processes for diffusing, adopting and scaling. This chapter looks at how this innovation process is implemented across the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) membership and whether an innovation “due diligence” is in place. It analyses the missing dots between early-stage pilots and late-stage scaling and further reflects on the need to think and learn more actively about innovation pathways as they are unfolding. The chapter discusses how DAC members fund parts of an innovation ecosystem and ways to optimise their different investments in a unified innovation approach to pool funds and reduce risks.

    

Key messages

• Successful innovative organisations are those that can identify and direct resources towards specific challenges, problems and opportunities; support and facilitate efforts to search for, invent and develop new ideas; invest resources in implementing and evaluating innovative approaches; and have dedicated resources and processes for diffusing, adopting and scaling processes.

• Good identification of problems means clearly analysing them, evaluating the pros and cons of existing solutions, and creating space and incentives for novel ones. This kind of innovation “due diligence” among most DAC members is lacking.

• Institutional and political pressures often lead to evidence from problem analyses being set aside in the interests of speedy and timely action. This can often lead to programmes being launched in the heat of the moment, without sufficient attention being paid to their design, assumptions and theories of change.

• Across DAC members as a whole, greater effort is needed to reflect on the end to-end process of innovation efforts and related outcomes. This means connecting the dots between early-stage pilots and late-stage scaling; and thinking and learning more actively about innovation pathways as they are unfolding, and the factors and actors that enable or inhibit them.

• With few exceptions, the development sector has been slow to engage national and local innovators in innovation processes, despite the availability of highly relevant approaches, such as frugal innovation, which tap into the ideas and skills of innovators from the global South.

• While DAC members are tacitly aware of multiple pathways to scale, the rhetoric has been about private sector replication. The reality is that there are many theories of scale, of which this is just one. It is vital that scaling efforts do not focus on just one as the dominant approach. This would be counterproductive for individual innovation efforts, and would undervalue the considerable innovation capabilities within the public and non-profit sectors.

• While DAC members often celebrate effective innovations, these successes do not always lead to more systematic learning about innovation pathways. Building evidence about pathways to scale would benefit from a balanced examination of the successes that have already been achieved.

• DAC members often fund all of the elements of an innovation ecosystem – research, education, skills, scholarships, programmes, partnerships, networks – but do not actively seek to optimise their different investments in a unified innovation approach. Such investment in ecosystems for transformative and anticipatory innovation is something that could be usefully undertaken across donors, to pool funds and reduce risks.

How are problems and opportunities identified?

Research on innovation in a wide range of sectors reveals that while each innovation process is distinctive, common patterns can be discerned in terms of how innovations progress from an initial idea to having an impact on operational and policy responses. According to the member survey, DAC members across the board are aware of innovation “stage gate” processes and their role in moving from idea development to testing at scale. This chapter sets out the lessons learnt from across the DAC membership about how such processes have been established and implemented.

Successful innovative organisations are those that can identify the specific issues, problems and opportunities towards which innovation resources should be directed. In some settings, this builds on awareness of needs, based on those enduring, repeated or emerging areas where standard approaches are coming up short. In other contexts, it is awareness or discovery of a new possible solution that can trigger recognition of the opportunity for innovation. Identification of problems and opportunities requires resources, well-defined processes for analysing problems, and the means of agreeing upon priorities and using these to trigger subsequent efforts in search and discovery.

Current state of play

Across DAC members, the survey and case studies reveal a host of challenges that are seen as priorities for innovation, including health, climate, biodiversity, human rights, disability democracy, governance, gender and humanitarian issues. Some members also see specific technological solutions as important avenues for exploration (e.g. data, digital, frontier technologies, etc.).

Despite the existence of frameworks such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and departmental development priorities, it is not always clear how different macro-problems are determined to be the focus of organisation-wide innovation efforts. In the absence of more formal mechanisms, a number of factors can be seen as having an influence:

• key individuals: especially at the senior leadership and political level, certain people have considerable influence over what gets innovation attention in terms of investments

• existing organisational capabilities, including in innovation: where particular donors have a strong track record in a given area, they are generally more likely to be open to exploring new possibilities

• engagement of other donors and relevant partners: in some cases, problems are prioritised because of the attention a particular area of work receives, rather than because of the actual development or humanitarian needs involved

• changes in context and need: specific developments such as the climate emergency, new emerging diseases, etc. can drive interest and investment in innovation in particular areas.

Within selected sectors or thematic areas, innovation initiatives among case study countries typically start with a process of consultation to determine what might be relevant areas for innovation to focus on. Such exercises have been wide-ranging, addressing:

• different sectoral issues (e.g. global mental health, better rural sanitation)

• major global challenges (sustainable urbanisation, preventing violence)

• context-specific problems faced in a particular region or country (e.g. how to strengthen human development indicators in United Republic of Tanzania or digital development in the Asia-Pacific region)

• opportunities generated by new technological advances (e.g. frontier technologies).

These prioritisation exercises vary in scope and form, but typically involve some or all of the following:

• in-depth processes of desk research, including literature reviews and syntheses of science and knowledge on a given topic (e.g. the UK Department for International Development [DFID]’s work on water and sanitation innovations)

• consultations with the “usual suspects” inside a given sector and select outsiders (e.g. Grand Challenges efforts in new areas such as conflict and accountability and voice)

• open, crowdsourced approaches that use social media and other technologies to develop priorities from a wide range of stakeholders, including the public (e.g. use of crowdsourcing and similar platforms to identify innovation needs)

• forming expert advisory groups that provide ideas and inputs into setting priorities (e.g. Global Innovation Fund strategic and technical advisory groups).

Key issues for consideration

Across these efforts, three issues consistently emerge. First, the nature of the problems that need innovation vary considerably in their scope. Work on Grand Challenges has identified four distinct kinds of issues:

• business-as-usual problems (e.g. developing a new treatment for childhood diarrhoea)

• big emerging problems (e.g. how to address challenges such as sustainable urban infrastructure or affordable energy use in rural areas)

• systemic transformation problems (e.g. how to move towards green and circular economy efforts across an entire country or sector)

• innovation ecosystem problems (e.g. how to ensure the innovation system itself is working in an effective and inclusive fashion).

While in principle DAC members are willing to work on all of these areas, innovation efforts tend to get more institutional traction in the first area. An understandable emphasis on such “known knowns” can shape prioritisation exercises, influencing the questions that are asked, who they are asked of and the answers that are heard the most loudly.

Second, prioritisation consultations routinely neglect actors in the global South. While in some cases governments and civil society organisations might be represented, the communities living in settings where development and humanitarian innovation will be implemented are seldom, if ever, involved in such efforts. This highlights a critical issue: that DAC donors often seek to develop priorities through consultation, but the reality of poor and vulnerable communities is that more emphasis is needed on active, direct observations and listening (see Box 4.1). Despite continual refrains about user-focused innovation, efforts that build on immersions in community lives are not yet a routine part of how innovation needs are established.

Third, even the most effective prioritisation exercises are not always used fully when it comes to programme design in DAC members. In some cases, this may be because of the necessarily high-level aggregated nature of such efforts: the resulting priorities are often too high level and generic to be put to concrete use. For example, many prioritisation exercises might call for “innovations to enable better community engagement”, but this is hardly enough to take decisions about what should be done.

Good identification of problems goes beyond saying “We need innovation for x” to clearly analysing those problems, evaluating the pros and cons of existing solutions, and providing a space for novel solutions. This kind of innovation “due diligence” is mostly noticeable by its absence. Institutional and political pressures often lead to evidence from consultations being set aside in the interests of speedy and timely action. While this might be a pragmatic way of capitalising on windows of opportunity for innovation, it can often lead to programmes being launched in the heat of the moment, without sufficient attention being paid to their design, assumptions and theories of change.

Box 4.1. Elrha’s global humanitarian innovation prioritisation process

Major gaps exist in the evidence base and the innovative capacities underpinning humanitarian action. Achieving a humanitarian system that is truly anticipatory and fit for purpose in responding to crises requires building more effective alliances within and between communities of science, research and innovation.

Funded initially by the UK Department for International Development and subsequently by other DAC donors including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the leading player in global humanitarian innovation, in 2017 the Elrha network launched the Global Prioritisation Exercise for Humanitarian Research and Innovation (GPE). This is an effort to transform the impact of research and innovation in the humanitarian system. The GPE’s aim is to provide public visibility on the range of global investments, capacity and activity in humanitarian research and innovation, and to widely consult and identify shared priorities for further investment and action.

The exercise was initiated with a global mapping, intended to provide a detailed baseline of global humanitarian research and innovation activity, as viewed through published outputs during 2016-17. The data presented revealed not only the range of the thematic, technical and geographic focus of activity during this period, but also mapped the numerous funders and actors active in this space.

These early results raised important questions about how well current investments and activity align with recognised humanitarian priorities and needs, and revealed interesting differences between the focus of research and innovation communities. The data also showed a marked disparity between the geographical locations of funding recipients compared to the geographical focus of the research and innovation activities themselves. The vast majority of research and innovation resources were both provided and received by actors in the global North. This important finding suggests that more needs to be done to shift funding allocations to partners closer to where humanitarian needs are most directly experienced.

Guided by the preliminary results, the second phase of the GPE will be a global consultation with key stakeholders in humanitarian research, evidence and innovation, to identify shared priorities for research and innovation action and investments.

Source: Global Emergency Group et al. (2017[1]), Global Prioritisation Exercise for Research and Innovation in the Humanitarian System: Phase One Mapping, www.elrha.org/researchdatabase/global-prioritisation-exercise-research-innovation-humanitarian-system-phase-one-mapping.

How are ideas and proposals generated and developed?

The generation of ideas and development of proposals is a vital part of the innovation process. It typically involves support to and facilitation of activities focusing on searching for, inventing and developing new ideas. It includes scanning of potential solutions to identified problems, prototyping new approaches, and undertaking “proof of concept” assessments. Developing proposals is crucial for turning initial ideas into valid and testable approaches in development and humanitarian contexts.

Current state of play

When it comes to identifying and developing innovative solutions, there is a clear and notable desire to hear from and listen to more stakeholders beyond each given organisation – especially among the private sector, entrepreneurs and scientists. All the survey respondents and case study countries emphasised the importance of establishing relationships with this range of actors in a variety of thematic innovation areas, from health to infrastructure.

A key lesson from across all the case studies is that there are few, if any, innovative solutions that are simply “out there” waiting to be taken up into development and humanitarian contexts. While innovation fairs and similar exercises play an important role in expanding the space for possibilities, almost all of these stakeholders need to undertake a process of iterative learning – with DAC members, implementing partners and counterparts in developing countries, to genuinely understand how their ideas might add value – and a robust and contextually relevant innovation process. This process takes time, resources and patience and is an important reason why innovation efforts in the sector should not be reduced to a “magic bullet” solution: not only is this flawed thinking, but it can also create unrealistic expectations among stakeholders who are new to the sector.

Key issues for consideration

There is again something of a global South blind spot here, in terms of failing to recognise and capitalise on the potential of Southern innovators. This is despite the availability of highly relevant approaches such as frugal innovation, which tap into the ideas and skills of innovators from the global South. With few exceptions, the development sector has been slow to engage national and local innovators in idea generation processes.

Unchecked, the innovation for development effort as it is currently designed and implemented risks placing more emphasis on technology transfer to the global South as opposed to innovation collaboration with those countries. This should be viewed as a significant missed opportunity.

How to implement and evaluate innovation projects and programmes?

This stage of the innovation process relates to how proposed solutions are trialled and piloted and systematically analysed, with the results used to move ideas forward into efforts to scale, or into further adjustment, iteration and testing. Innovative organisations are those which have resources and skills in both the implementation and evaluation of innovative approaches, and a means by which to take successful innovations forward.

Current state of play

Across all the case studies, DAC donors are working on innovation on several levels:

• Micro-level innovation projects directly involve innovators and individuals in specific contexts, providing direct support and investment in areas such as capital, technology, skills, and infrastructure and innovation management processes (e.g. the range of ongoing efforts in blockchain for development or in mobile technology for disease mapping).

• Mid-level programmes piloting a range of similar approaches across various contexts, with the means in place to test and assess progress and impact (e.g. testing out new approaches to community-based sanitation in specific socio-cultural contexts).

• Large-scale programmes that have built on key lessons to scale, and are considering technical and institutional or systems dimensions of diffusion, including finance, legal, regulatory and other conditions (e.g. cash-based programming, digital financial services).

A common finding was that innovation donors struggle to move beyond micro-level initiatives that bundle together such projects. The widely recognised and bemoaned phenomenon of “pilotitis” is testament to this: “[the] proliferation of small, technically-driven pilots across Asia and Africa – often testing similar applications” (Chamberlain, 2012[2]). Those leading innovation efforts within DAC members increasingly see it as important to “graduate” from implementing many micro-projects towards more meso- and large-scale programmes. However, this is not always straightforward. The middle ground between creative, high-risk but small-scale innovation projects, which can be seen as relatively unchallenging, and more conventional, low-risk, large-scale programmes, which are the norm for development and humanitarian donors, has not been effectively filled.

Initiatives such as challenge funds are a good example of such an emerging approach in practice. These funds increasingly recognise that significant gains are to be made in the middle “meso-zone” and require a forensic, focused and considered effort to bridge the gap through the application and take-up of evidence and research (see Box 4.2).

Box 4.2. DAC members’ use of challenge funds as a means of strengthening implementation and evaluation

Challenge funds are one of the primary means by which Development Assistance Committee members engage in innovation activities, especially at cross-donor level. Prominent examples include the Global Innovation Fund (supported by the UK Department for International Development, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Sida (Swedish International Development Agency), the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and USAID among others). In 2018, Sida commissioned an evaluation of its investments in ten challenge funds over a decade. The results are relevant beyond Sida and for the donor community as a whole. Key lessons include:

• The rationale behind challenge funds includes using open competition to trigger innovative and cost-effective solutions to development challenges we do not have the answers for and mobilising private capital to match grants – innovation is a central component of these funds, which may choose to invest in existing, imported or tweaked solutions that need strengthening.

• The test for successful innovation should require that the solution be demonstrably more cost-effective than current mainstream practice in a given area, rather than simply the “newness” of the idea – the focus on effectiveness means that challenge funds can be a relevant mechanism for marshalling multiple organisations working on a single issue or problem towards a measurable outcome.

• For funds focused on innovation, it is important to be clear about the stage of innovation to be supported, what can realistically be achieved within the lifetime of the programme, what kind of technical assistance will be required to support innovators during programme implementation and what kind of additional support mechanisms may be required to support further development towards impact at scale – this may also include consideration of whether the challenge fund mechanism can deliver the desired development impact as a stand-alone programme or if it should be considered as a component of a more broadly focused programme.

• Challenge funds use a range of design features and direct interventions to ensure that funded projects have impact and are sustainable beyond the lifespan of the fund itself. All such interventions carry costs and involve trade-offs, as they require the fund managers to spend time and resources (either directly or by outsourcing to experts) on specific activities.

• Challenge funds are good at gathering evidence on “what works” around innovative solutions to development challenges, but not as good at using that knowledge productively. There is a notable imbalance between the effort devoted to seeding and testing new products, processes and services, and the limited focus on dissemination and uptake of these innovations.

• Despite greater focus among challenge funds towards actively fostering sustainability, with very limited exceptions, they do not use longitudinal studies conducted some three to five years after the end of project funding to track the outcomes and impact of fund activities; the absence of long-term tracking studies makes it difficult to conduct a definitive cost-benefit analysis of the effectiveness of different activities to support sustainability.

• There are structural reasons why donors and fund managers focus on challenge fund design and implementation rather than long-term tracking and diffusion of ideas; in particular, donor funding tends to be short term and limited to the duration of particular programmes.

Source: IPE Triple Line (2018[3]), Evaluation of Sida’s Global Challenge Funds: Lessons from a Decade Long Journey, www.sida.se/contentassets/eb4c7e1c459a4ccbb8c3e6dbd1843219/2018_1_evaluation_of_sidas_global_challenge_funds.pdf.

All participating DAC member organisations flagged the evidence requirements of innovation efforts. There is not yet a culture of evidence-based innovation – evaluation and evidence are often absent. Different stages of the innovation process need distinct research approaches: early stages are typically about proof of concept; later stages require objective assessments of coverage and impact. In general, more work has been done on ex ante assessments to launch new pilots and rather less on ex post efforts to assess costs and benefits and make the argument for further testing and dissemination.

An interesting collaborative initiative underway at the time of writing is the DAC marker on innovation for development, which is currently being piloted across the DAC membership. This involves the design and testing of a systematic method of tracking innovation as proposed by Canada to the DAC Working Party on Development Finance Statistics in June 2018. The pilot, which ran over the course of 2019, tested the use of an innovation marker in the OECD Creditor Reporting System to allow DAC members and international stakeholders to identify and track innovation components of new projects in a systematic way.

The pilot’s objective was two-fold:

1. 1. to test the feasibility of identifying and tracking projects with an innovation component

2. 2. to qualify the innovation component of the projects according to the proposed marker methodology.

Australia, Belgium, France and Slovenia are also piloting the innovation marker’s feasibility and methodology in their international assistance programmes. Germany, Ireland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States are closely following its evolution and engaging on an advisory basis. The overarching intent is to collect and generate data and learning, and disseminate knowledge, including from promising innovations that have the potential to scale for greater impact on poverty reduction.

Key issues for consideration

As noted above, there are challenges for donors in moving beyond micro-level pilot projects and initiatives that bundle together such projects. Pilotitis is not benign: it has led to waste, inefficiency and confusion across the sector, and in an infamous case involving mobile health innovations in Uganda, a government moratorium banned all new mobile phone-based innovation initiatives. However, moving into meso- and large-scale investments in innovation are not always straightforward, for a number of reasons:

• Transaction and staff costs at the meso- and large scales are relatively high: such initiatives can be low in terms of monetary investments required, but high in terms of staff time, and therefore do not align well with current donor imperatives around spend and “burn rates”.

• Skills and capabilities are different to initial testing: as well as technical skills, there is a need for greater political and advocacy skills – these are not always easy to simply bring into an innovation project that is already underway.

• Resourcing: many existing funds compete to support early-stage innovations, leading to a recognised “valley of death” in financing beyond these stages.

• Evidence gaps: many pilots do not place enough emphasis on rigorous learning, so are not in a position to argue for greater resourcing.

• Institutional barriers: the point at which a promising innovation seems to have further scope is also where creative minorities have to face down vested interests that have more to gain from the status quo than from novel approaches.

Even in those DAC members where an evidence culture is relatively strong, the role of monitoring, evaluation and learning in innovation is weak at both project and portfolio levels. In general, innovation efforts are supported by favourable narratives and selective use of statistics rather than systematic analysis. Some innovation programmes use ideas from theories of change and theories of action to set out assumptions, hypotheses, comparative metrics of success and failure, and ideas for scaling strategies. But these tend to be the exceptions, not the rule.

How are innovations diffused, adopted and scaled?

This part of the innovation process sees solutions moving to widespread use through a variety of mechanisms, including open-source dissemination, replication, incorporation into government structures and commercialisation. Effective capabilities in diffusion, adoption and scale include dedicated resources and processes for demonstrating value added and making the case for diffusion and adoption; relevant investment in competencies and infrastructure to support scaling processes; and creating the space and scope for “creative destruction” of existing and established practices, and bringing about systemic changes in the organisation and its wider ecosystem.

Current state of play

The most widespread framework for the diffusion of innovations, developed by the scholar Everett Rogers, was informed by extensive studies and research in developing countries in the 1950s and 1960s, including Rogers’ own work on agricultural extension services in rural areas. In part, at least, this was because “technology was assumed to be the heart of development” (Rogers, 2005[4]). But exactly how diffusion at scale is achieved is still something of an enigma in many development and humanitarian settings.

Where innovations have moved to scale in the sector, including across the case study countries, it can be attributed to a process of iterative, adaptive learning across three interlinked domains: 1) technical solutions; 2) organisational and business models; and 3) institutions, norms and politics. All of the most successful development and humanitarian innovations identified in the DAC peer learning exercise involved concerted efforts across all three of these domains.

Also, the work of Geoff Mulgan, former CEO of Nesta UK, sets out five distinct pathways to scale, as shown in Table 4.1. Lessons from across DAC members indicate that scaling up a development or humanitarian innovation to achieve impact often entails a combination of the strategies listed below, employed thoughtfully and persistently across the three domains over a sustained time period to build momentum, support and widespread adoption.

Table 4.1. Pathways of growth and replication
Pathways of growth and replication
Advocacy	Spread through advocacy, persuasion and the sense of a movement; e.g. environmental non-profit response to acid rain pollution in the United States.
Networks	Grow through professional and other networks, helped by some evaluation; e.g. the 12-step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Programmes	Replicate through programmes and partnerships, sometimes with payment, intellectual property, technical assistance and consultancy; e.g. Grameen Bank’s replication within Bangladesh and then worldwide.
Direct control	Organic growth of a single organisation, sometimes including takeovers, sometimes with federated governance structure; e.g. Amnesty International or Greenpeace.
Source: Mulgan, G. et al. (2007[5]), Social Innovation: What It Is, Why It Matters and How It Can Be Accelerated, https://youngfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Social-Innovation-what-it-is-why-it-matters-how-it-can-be-accelerated-March-2007.pdf.

Three of the case study countries – Australia, Sweden and the United Kingdom – have worked actively as members of the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA) network to establish a Working Group on Scaling Innovation. This group has established a set of common insights for funders seeking to take promising development innovations to scale.

These insights are organised into three discrete, yet complementary and interdependent, areas:

• First, dividing the scaling process into six overlapping stages, on a continuum from ideation through to sustainable scale.

• Second, eight good practices have been identified across these stages to help funders of development innovation enhance the impact of their support (Figure 4.1).

• Finally, a matrix of influencing factors that will either accelerate or constrain the scaling process has been created, with guidance on how funders can use these to initially assess – and continue to monitor – the scalability of an innovation over time.

Figure 4.1. IDIA good practices for funders in supporting scale

Source: IDIA (2017[6]), Insights on Scaling Innovation, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b156e3bf2e6b10bb0788609/t/ 5b1717eb8a922da5042cd0bc/1528240110897/Insights+on+Scaling+Innovation.pdf.

A key lesson for scaling work is that the wide-scale adoption of an innovation at the desired level of scale or exponential growth is shaped and influenced by the wider ecosystem of actors. The case studies show examples of donors actively considering and investing in innovation ecosystems at different levels. For example:

• global: Swedish and UK government investments in the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation (now closed); national innovation hubs such as the United Kingdom’s Global Disability and Innovation Hub; and those in the Netherlands, Norway, etc.

• national: innovation ecosystems in countries of the global South

• regional/local: innovation ecosystems in particular cities or regions.

These tend to be areas where there is a distinctive product (e.g. cholera vaccines, female contraceptives, vitamin-fortified seeds). However, ecosystems are also essential in areas where products have not yet emerged (e.g. treatments for Ebola) or in specific technological areas, most notably digital.

A number of the DAC members are also members of the “Million Lives Club”, an initiative that highlights, catalogues and learns from the cohort of innovators whose efforts have reached a million or more end users. This is intended to serve as a kind of “S&P 500” for social impact, helping to promote successful scaling efforts and better connect innovators to potential scaling partners, such as local governments or impact investors.

Key issues for consideration

Across DAC members as a whole, greater effort is needed to reflect on the end-to-end process of innovation efforts and related outcomes. This means joining the dots between early-stage pilots and late-stage scaling; and thinking and learning more actively about innovation pathways as they are unfolding, and the factors and actors that enable or inhibit them.

While DAC members are tacitly aware of multiple pathways to scale, the rhetoric has focused on private sector replication. The reality is that there are many theories of scale, of which this is just one. It is vital that scaling efforts do not focus on just one as the dominant approach, as this would be counterproductive for individual innovation efforts and would undervalue the considerable innovation capabilities within the public and non-profit sectors.

At present, DAC members are not sufficiently joined up internally or externally when it comes to innovation efforts. Not enough attention is paid to how internal mechanisms can work to ensure testing and scaling of effective innovations; and, in particular, to establishing a clear link between funding innovations at one end of the pathway and being open to using purchasing power for proven innovations at the other.

While DAC members often celebrate effective innovations, these successes do not always lead to more systematic learning about innovation pathways. Often, staff members’ grasp of how a particular innovation has moved from idea to scale is very simplistic and does not help others to grasp the particularities of the context, or to recognise the enablers of effective and practical application of novel and creative approaches. Building evidence on pathways to scale would benefit from a balanced examination of the successes that have already been achieved.

DAC members often fund all of the elements of an innovation ecosystem – research, education, skills, scholarships, programmes, partnerships, networks – but do not actively seek to optimise their different investments in a unified innovation approach. Such investment in ecosystems for transformative and anticipatory innovation is something that could be usefully undertaken across donors, to pool funds and reduce risks.

References

[2] Chamberlain, S. (2012), Pilot-itis: What’s the Cure?, BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcmediaaction/entries/e00fc35a-0c0f-3e35-8280-38d048c34487 (accessed on 1 January 2020).

[1] Global Emergency Group et al. (2017), Global Prioritisation Exercise for Research and Innovation in the Humanitarian System: Phase One Mapping, Elrha, Cardiff, http://www.elrha.org/researchdatabase/global-prioritisation-exercise-research-innovation-humanitarian-system-phase-one-mapping/ (accessed on 1 January 2020).

[6] IDIA (2017), Insights on Scaling Innovation, International Development Innovation Alliance, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b156e3bf2e6b10bb0788609/t/5b1717eb8a922da5042cd0bc/1528240110897/Insights+on+Scaling+Innovation.pdf (accessed on 1 January 2020).

[3] IPE Triple Line (2018), Evaluation of Sida’s Global Challenge Funds: Lessons from a Decade Long Journey, Swedish International Development Agency, Stockholm, https://www.sida.se/contentassets/eb4c7e1c459a4ccbb8c3e6dbd1843219/2018_1_evaluation_of_sidas_global_challenge_funds.pdf (accessed on 1 January 2020).

[5] Mulgan, G. et al. (2007), Social Innovation: What It Is, Why It Matters and How It Can Be Accelerated, The Young Foundation, https://youngfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Social-Innovation-what-it-is-why-it-matters-how-it-can-be-accelerated-March-2007.pdf (accessed on 1 January 2020).

[4] Rogers, E. (2005), Diffusion of Innovations, Free Press.