Innovation and development assistance: from the everyday to the cutting edge

Alan AtKisson, Assistant Director-General, Sida

Adapted from a keynote speech to SMC Inspirational Day, 7 Feb 2022

Photo Credit: ABALOBI

If there was ever a time when we needed to harness the power of innovation to reinforce the positive forces in this world and accelerate sustainable development, especially for people living in poverty and oppression, it is surely now. These are very challenging times, with good and bad news swirling around together in an ever more dynamic mix. I could lay out a long list of statistics about development trends, some hopeful, some deeply worrying. But I like the way an old colleague of mine once summed things up: “Things are getting better and better, and worse and worse, faster and faster.”

The situation today often reminds of a story from the classic children’s book series about Alice in Wonderland. In this fairy tale by Lewis Carroll, young Alice meets the Red Queen, who takes her by the hand, and they immediately start running as fast as they can. Eventually they get tired and must stop. Then Alice notices that despite all the running, they actually have not moved forward at all. Then the Red Queen explains to her that in this part of Wonderland, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

According to current data, we need to run twice as fast, or faster, if we are to achieve the global vision we call the 2030 Agenda, which includes the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and the Addis Abeba Action Agenda for financing it all.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m running as fast I can, it goes without saying that I cannot double my running speed. So I need to consider new options. I need to find a faster, better way of getting where I want to go. 

That is why we need innovation for sustainable development and poverty reduction. Even if what we have been doing is working well and delivering beautiful results, the pace of change in our world (a good deal of which is going in the wrong direction), the growing scale of the challenges faced by people in low and middle-income countries (such as climate change and shifts to more authoritarian forms of government), and the rising threats to the outcomes we are all dedicated to achieving in development cooperation, not least those left in the wake of the pandemic – all of that requires us to consider new possibilities.

We may be very good at running. But what we really need is a car. Or better still, an airplane – powered by renewable energy, of course – because if we just keep running, we will eventually tire out and not meet our goals.

So what is innovation? Let me be clear that I am not just talking about technical advances in health, or new kinds of solar panels. Of course these are innovations. But in development, we must think more broadly than that.

I also am not going to quote to you an official definition of innovation in a development context, though you can read a number of publications about it on the OECD’s website. I am not going to quote formal definitions because I think we need to approach innovation in a way that is much less technical, much less mysterious, and much more a normal part of development work.

To get some help on that point, when I first started working at Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, I turned to Sweden’s public agency for innovation, Vinnova. It turns out that Vinnova does not even use a formal definition of innovation. One of their senior specialists explained their way of thinking about it in very simple terms: innovation is anything that is new, useful, and can be put to good use.

I love that definition, or rather non-definition, because it opens up innovation for the participation of just about everybody. Also, speaking as someone with a long history working on systems thinking, innovation, and sustainable development, it is also very appropriate for working development.

First, an innovation does not even have to be “brand new”. New means, new in this context. Here is an example. Some of the methods used in ecological or so-called organic agriculture have been around in some form for thousands of years. But when reintroduced in a modern context – to replace overuse of pesticides, say, or problematic monocropping – they are innovations. They are new, useful, and can be put to use to make things better.

So practicing innovation does not always mean inventing something fancy or complicated. It can also involve spreading a good and important idea, trying out a new way of holding a meeting, testing a solution in a place or an organization that has never seen that solution before – and sometimes, doing several of these things all at the same time.

Let me give you some examples from the organizations that Sida supports in our work with civil society.

Photo Credit: ABALOBI

·       The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (Naturskyddsföreningen) is working with small-scale fisheries in South Africa, bringing marginalized people working in that sector together with researchers and empowering them with a mobile app so they can get their fish directly to market, hopping over middlemen, dealing directly with restaurants, and building a more sustainable fishery – from hook, as they say, to cook. Or perhaps I should have written, “hopping over middlepersons”. The program also focuses on strengthening women’s role in these fisheries. The program is called “ABALOBI” and it has already spread to other countries.

As you probably noticed, what’s innovative here is not just the mobile app, but the whole approach, including the interplay between a civil society organisation, the group it is aiming to support, and private sector actors. Innovation thrives in those sorts of situations, where different sectors and groups meet and discover new ways to collaborate. Here’s another example.

·       Läkarmissionen (LM), a Swedish faith-based development organisation, played host to an initiative called SustAid that brings together private companies, public agencies, civil society actors and others to actively develop innovations for humanitarian aid. If you go into the SustAid website you’ll find a whole list of exciting ideas (in Swedish) to address humanitarian needs more efficiently and effectively, from water technology solutions to creative ways to increase access to legal services.

The SustAid program has now moved to a new base at the UNOPS innovation office in Sweden – but that’s exactly the kind of thing that often happens with successful innovation programs. Civil society is often where they get born, because civil society has a unique ability to bring actors together. And as I keep emphasizing, just doing that – bringing new actors together, in a process of collaboration – is a powerful motor for innovation itself. Creating new partnerships is a kind of “innovation for innovation”.

At the larger scale, I am sure many people reading this article are involved in discussions about shifting power and resources to actors in low- and middle-income countries, or at least taking note of the conversations about that topic now growing at the international level. These conversations often go under the heading “decolonizing aid”. The ideas that are being discussed are certainly not new. But the way the concept is now being framed, presented, discussed and acted upon is absolutely an innovation – one with a very high-leverage, indeed transformative, potential.

For I should note that not all innovations are created equal. Some are more powerful than others when it comes to causing large-scale change. As a rule, the more transformative they are, they more difficult they are to introduce and gain acceptance for. My mentor from long ago, Donella Meadows, helped many of us to understand this concept by describing a kind of hierarchy of leverage points in systems – places where you can introduce innovations and facilitate change, with varying degrees of power. Meadows’ typology of leverage points ranges from places to make rather easy, small adjustments, to approaches for making big, transformative paradigm shifts. If you are interested diving deeper, read this article that introduced her seminal work.

Those are exciting examples and ideas, but I also want to underscore something much more fundamental, something that can help us think differently about innovation and include it more easily and more often in our ordinary way of working. And that’s this: sustainable development is innovation.

Identifying new policies, approaches, practices, technologies, funding mechanisms, strategies for resisting negative change … all that and more involves innovation. Even promoting fundamental normative values such as – to cite just one example – gender equality is, in many contexts, an innovation, and one that often meets with strong resistance. The establishment and spread of new values follows the same process as the spread of other kinds of new ideas, a process that innovation researchers have studied for many years. 

Promoting and establishing most of the ideas and practices that can help us achieve sustainable development always involves introducing new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things, new tools, new procedures, and of course, new values.

Of course, by trying to position innovation as normal, I also do not want to pretend that innovation is always easy. Innovation meets resistance of all kinds – much of it within ourselves. I have a job title that includes the word innovation, and I am regularly humbled when I look at my own behavior and realize that I have been unnecessarily resistant to a perfectly good and useful new idea. Most of us are most comfortable sticking with what we know, especially when we know it works. I often hear the voice of my grandfather in my head. He was a farmer, and one of his own favorite sayings was, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And of course there is great wisdom in that.

But then we must come back to the world we are living in today, and to the story of the Red Queen. Which is why I want to close by telling you about two new approaches to innovation.

That’s right: people are innovating in the field of development innovation. Learning how to do innovation itself in more innovative ways. Here are two big examples.

First, there is the concept of systems innovation. It sounds a bit complicated, because it is a bit complicated. But it’s not hard to understand. System innovation just a way of thinking bigger, aiming higher with innovation. It involves taking a look at the whole system you want to improve or change, and designing a whole suite of innovative interventions that, working together, can really lift things to a higher level – whether it’s a local health system, a school system, an economic development process etc. Recently Sida, together with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the EU’s Climate-KIC, launched something called the Systems Innovation Learning Partnership, so check out their website if you want to learn more.

And second, there is the new concept of “missions”, a familiar word that has a new, special meaning in this context. A “mission” involves thinking even bigger – setting a sort of moonshot goal – and then mobilizing new partnerships, methods, innovations and resources to try to achieve it. It can still include starting small and testing prototypes, but it involves aiming ultimately to go very, very big – such as transforming a whole city, or a whole nation’s energy system, which are two examples of what some early champions of the missions-idea are trying to do. Read more about the “Missions” concept at Vinnova’s website. 

So if you are interested in deepening or broadening your engagement with innovation for poverty reduction and sustainable development, there is truly a very wide spectrum available to you, from the very big, visionary, and transformative approaches like systems innovation and the “missions” approach, to the kind of innovation we need to keep practicing in our everyday working lives. Testing new working methods. Promoting well-proven ideas for positive change that just haven’t arrived yet to the place where you are. Or perhaps most powerfully, establishing new kinds of cross-sectoral relationships, that can, in turn, generate new ideas.

By embracing an innovation mindset and building it into our everyday work, we can ultimately zip past the Red Queen and achieve Agenda 2030. In fact, there is no other way to do it.

Alan AtKisson has worked over 30 years in the field of sustainable development as an innovator, change agent, organizational leader and senior advisor. He currently directs the Department of Partnership and Innovation at Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and oversees Sida’s portfolio of grants and cooperation initiatives in the fields of research, civil society, capacity development, guarantees and catalytic development finance, in addition to Sida’s work on development innovation and strategic partnerships.