Innovation is “in”. In 2014, the US Agency for International Development (USaid) and the Department for International Development (Dfid) have launched sizable initiatives: the US Global Development Lab and the Global Innovation Fund, respectively. Innovation hubs, incubators, and accelerators are popping up like mushrooms. Partnerships — especially with the private sector — are widely seen as essential to the innovation of solutions with scale.
So it seems that development professionals have a historic opportunity to disrupt the way development is done. But can we seize it?
Development organisations would do well to pay attention to the mounting evidence about innovation from the private sector. The unfortunate fact is that all organisations are engineered to do exactly what they are already doing. They find it difficult — often impossible — to introduce innovation beyond tweaks around the margins. As innovation gurus such as Clayton Christensen and Constantinos Markides have pointed out, startups are more likely to introduce radical innovations than incumbents, and even drive them out of business. Think Amazon v brick-and-mortar bookstores.
True innovation requires incumbents to think, learn, and act differently — to scrutinise their ingrained ways of doing things and turn core competencies into commercial possibilities.
Yes, commercial. Radical new approaches to development problems need to align the incentives of all involved, and likely entail profits for private sector actors — from small and medium-sized enterprises through to corporates with large value chains and footprints. Too often, innovation is confused with the need to come up with new ideas. But that is just one facet of the larger problem. For innovation to work, it must be practical and profitable.
Experience across sectors tells us that top management must take the lead on innovation. They need to take more than a “thumbs up, thumbs down” approach to adopting new ideas. They must play the roles of co-creators, sponsors, mentors, and advocates. The first step is creating a shared understanding of what innovation means.
Certain key principles — borrowed here from recent work by Peter Skarzynski and David Crosswhite (The Innovator’s Field Guide) and Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer (The Innovator’s Method) — apply to any organisation committed to innovation:
• Leave hierarchy behind
• Focus on the customer and on business model disruption
• Encourage white space thinking
• Identify elements of successful change in the past
• Pinpoint orthodoxies
• Forget the business plan
• Fail often, fail fast
• Experiment, but mitigate risk
• Establish criteria for prioritizing opportunities
Many in the development community would look at this list and say we have a long way to go. The question is how to get from here to there. Once again, we can take some hints from the private sector.
To promote internal entrepreneurship, our organisations need to build a lean innovation architecture that enables fast decision making. Bureaucratic processes that mimic our reactive culture (RFPs and RFAs, proposals and grant applications, lengthy reviews) may have a place for some purposes, but will not likely promote the game-changing innovation we need.
Mechanisms like Shell’s GameChanger hub or distributed innovation hubs in the field will be key to success. Quick-turnaround tools like “sandpits,” to come up with ideas in a week’s time and then roll them out quickly, are another option. IBM’s IdeaJam, a crowdsourcing process to rapidly capture ideas across the organization, is also an interesting model. Idea bars, bureaucracy buster awards, innovation marketplaces, IdeaBoxes, launchpads — whatever the mechanisms we choose, our goal should be a continuous process as opposed to relying on one-off challenges or competitions, with pathways in place to take new concepts all the way through to implementation. We want to avoid “innovation islands” that fizzle and die after an initial phase of excitement.
One thing is clear: it will not be possible to shift our organisations toward the kind of mindsets required for innovation by assigning one person to the task. We need to build an innovation ecosystem within and across our organisations, starting with a core team endorsed by top-tier leadership. This team should cut across organisational, functional, hierarchical, and geographic silos, with an emphasis on people in the field.
If we are to reinvent development, we need to remember the old adage, “physician, heal thyself”. We need to build a new generation of self-critical organisations — public and private, for-profit and nonprofit — that are willing and able to disrupt themselves, now and continuously into the future. Anything less and we may be left in the dust by new players on the development scene, and deservedly so. Worse, we may find ourselves a decade from now still wondering how to deliver on the same grand challenges we face today.
Brigit Helms is the director of the USaid-funded Speed project in Mozambique
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