Innovation for Development Impact
Lessons from the OECD Development Assistance Committee
The development co-operation community needs to innovate to meet the global challenges ahead. Although it has an established track record for innovating partnerships, funding instruments and technologies, they are not enough to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals. This report synthesises the lessons emerging from an OECD Development Assistance Committee peer learning exercise on how innovation efforts can be strengthened, individually and collectively, to achieve the 2030 Agenda. The report is organised around three blocks – strategy, management and culture; organisation and collaboration; and, the innovation process – and provides recommendations on how innovation can best benefit poor and vulnerable people around the world.
Also available in: French
The development innovation process
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.
Also available in: French
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