2020 Training - Participant Reflections

William Blomfield

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, CLIMATE INNOVATION & INVESTMENTS, DFAT

@itinerantwill 

“Charting innovative territory while the world grapples with COVID-19”

It is almost trite to say that addressing climate change remains amongst humanity’s most pressing challenges. In a few short decades, we need to re-align our financial systems, decarbonise global economies, build greater resilience and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

As an Australian diplomat focused on climate change and innovation, my professional career is all about developing novel approaches that catalyse change and create impact to respond to these enormous challenges.

With this in mind, I was excited to have the opportunity to participate in the IDIA training on ‘Managing Innovation for Impact’ in September 2020.

I certainly had some pre-conceived (and it turns out very limited) notions of what innovation entailed, and a healthy dose of skepticism about the whole concept of ‘innovation’ – which seemed to me to be the latest ‘buzz’ theme in development policy – and how I might be able to facilitate innovation within my organisation.

However, I was pleasantly surprised by the training and came away professionally enriched, motivated and eager to take forward some of the learnings.

Taking place in mid-2020, the virtual delivery of the training charted ‘innovative’ territory, as the world grappled with COVID-19. The training was delivered over various time zones over several weeks, rather than the usual in-person concentrated period, as we all sought to participate while fulfilling other professional and personal (notably home schooling!) responsibilities.

Delivered by an experienced and diverse team with a wide range of expertise, throughout the training remained engaging, varied and participative, with a useful mix of session preparation, lecture-style and breakout discussions, as well as individualised attention.

In terms of the content of the course, the training offered a balance of theories and practical activities, informed by well-selected case studies from all around the world. A number of insights challenged my various assumptions on innovation and resonated with me.

My first lightbulb moment was the understanding of the fundamental importance of scaling. I had always thought that innovation referred to the process of developing new early-stage approaches, but I soon realised that to drive transformative impact, innovation needed to be scaled. In addressing climate change, scaling what already works will be fundamental to many solutions – so I drank down several key lessons from pertinent case studies.

The session on systems thinking was similarly revelatory. It was useful to reflect on some of the theory and case studies as we seek to drive transformative changes necessary for our energy, food, transport and industrial systems. Another fun session focused on the power of narrative, with some excellent and practical tips on ‘storytelling’. Yet another useful session focused on unpacking some of the ‘innovation pathologies’ that organisations suffer from and identifying the ‘Problem space’, which was helpful to identify core obstacles. Finally, reflecting on the case studies, the link between success and focusing on core motivation resonated with me personally.

Hopefully, the course can revert to an in-person format, as it was quite difficult to remain fully ‘present’ in the virtual format and oftentimes plenty of value from these trainings can derive from the cohort and future network.

But the times demand an innovative approach – and IDIA’s global innovation thought leaders delivered a useful set of learnings on how to convert uncertainty into knowledge and drive innovation for impact in an engaging way, which no doubt I will revisit many times in the years ahead.