A unique, immersive experience for innovation development practitioners
The very first iteration of the IDIA “Managing Innovation for Impact” training was hosted by The Rockefeller Foundation at their conference centre in Bellagio, Italy from 8-12 October 2018. In 2019, the course was hosted by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) in the unique waterside setting of their Partnership Forum Centre in Härnösand, Sweden. Here, participants and faculty worked together to unpack and address the key contemporary challenges that managers in innovation-supporting agencies face in making informed decisions and impactful investments. The 2020 course was hosted virtually by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) due to the various restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, the Training course will return to an in-person residential experience in Naivasha, Kenya hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
As a residential course, participants are able to spend a concentrated period of time grappling with the most challenging parts of innovation management, while also building strong and lasting relationships with other participants and faculty members.
In this way, participants will benefit from the ‘cohort effect’ – the richness of experience that comes from training as part of a community. This initiative is specially designed to help build strong and sustainable relationships across the diverse cohort of faculty and participants to enable fellowship and interaction far beyond the duration of the course itself.
A COMPREHENSIVE AND COHERENT CURRICULUM
The training offering is designed to immerse participants in a coherent experiential ‘arc’ split into three phases:
Take-Off: participants immerse themselves in the context and rationale for the training, learn about others in the cohort and begin to interrogate some of their own thinking biases and assumptions that may influence how they engage with different parts of the course.
Fundamentals: participants explore the pros and cons of different tools and approaches to innovation and scaling practice, and includes a deep-dive site visit to understand how these apply in different contexts.
Landing: participants prepare to apply their learning within their role and anticipate the range of typical institutional challenges to be negotiated.
CONTEXTUALLY-IMMERSIVE
Part of our commitment to respecting contextual sensitivity is to ensure the participant cohorts we create and the location where the training takes place reflect a particular context / region as far as possible. For example, while our training cohorts intentionally include a diverse mix of funders, doers and other actors who play a part in the innovation and scaling process, we balance this diversity by some level of continuity among participants in terms of their sector interests (e.g. health) or regional location. This ensures that the training itself is able to both debate shared challenges at a level of meaningful depth, while also exposing participants to new actors, mindsets and approaches that they may not have come across before.
PERSONAL AGENCY & LEADERSHIP
With much of the training focusing on helping participants build their confidence and interrogate their own biases and assumptions around innovation and scaling, the training helps individuals enhance their current/potential leadership skills – including when to step aside and let others lead.
COMMUNITY & ECOSYSTEM
Our training and alumni network is contributing to building a critical mass of connected individuals across different sectors, industries and countries with the skills to both advance innovation and scaling within their contexts and to also bring others on board for the journey.