NGO Soul + Strategy 048. How to kindle innovation in large development agencies: Soren Vester Haldrup @ UNDP
Summary
Do you work in a large NGO or UN agency, and wonder how the heck you are supposed to stimulate innovations in such a sizable, potentially quite bureaucratic organization?
Do you assume that organization size and structure matter when it comes to creating a good climate for innovation?
And is lack of innovation funds as big an issue as we make it out to be?
In this podcast episode, I interview Soren Vester Haldrup, Innovation Fund Manager at UNDP, on how to kindle innovation in large development agencies. Many people associate 'innovative culture' with small start ups, but there is not necessarily a link between the two.
Soren’s Bio:
- Innovation Specialist and Fund Manager, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
- Board Member, Global Integrity
- Senior Consultant, Oxford Policy Management
- Policy Analyst, UNDP
We discuss:
- How and why UNDP's approach to innovation transitioned from a focus on going after small, project-size innovations to a portfolio approach of larger-scale innovations that aim to address system-level challenges and multi-faceted ‘wicked issues’ that only groups of actors can address
- Too many innovations are solutions looking for a problem; stay focused on the problem longer!
- Perhaps counter-intuitively (at least for me), not all solutions need to be pursued, as scale is not always good for wicked issues. Rather, UNDP uses an innovation funnel model, in which many innovations are expected to fail fast. But getting to that one solution that can be scaled is not always the solution
- You need buy-in from leadership at the right time and interest, engagement and encouragement from the grassroots
- UNDP uses 'deep demonstrations', instead of scaling. It also aims to create demand for innovations on the side of peers, primary constituents, and funders
- A leadership mindset of humility and comfort with uncertainty is not always present across cultures
- Human inertia may be present more strongly in large organizations because they’ve been around for a long time. And the number of approvals needed in such organizations is typically significant. On the other hand, in small organizations, groupthink can be more prevalent
- Availability of money is an issue, but the flexibility of money is a bigger issue
- Innovation is both about small tweaks to existing solutions as well as big breakthroughs to overcome system-wide issues
Resources:
Youtube video of this podcast
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