The Challenge
Innovation is a major driving force in global economic growth and development. The Economist magazine defines it as “new products, business processes, or organic changes that create wealth or social welfare,” or simply, “the fresh thinking that creates value.”
If you want an answer, ask everyone.
Historically, innovation has been practiced within institutions. And it has been largely driven by companies, individual innovators, or specialized researchers and designers rather than by those who are ultimate users of the innovations.
Over the last few decades, innovation has been moving to a more open and networked process—open to new ideas from enthusiasts (“the crowd”), from other fields, and from customers and end-users. Companies from Toyota to eBay have applied “open and user-driven” processes to their product development with revolutionary results. Increasing connectivity now offers an unprecedented opportunity to harness global creativity and add value to products and services.
Our Strategy
Open and user-driven innovation models are not being widely applied to meet the needs of poor or vulnerable people. The Foundation’s Advancing Innovation Processes to Solve Social Problems initiative, explores whether new innovation approaches can be applied more widely in development, and whether they can be scaled up for greater adoption.
The initiative supports four primary areas of activity:
- Testing the value and applicability of commercial innovation models for addressing social problems
- Scaling up or replicating existing socially-focused or not-for-profit innovation models
- Influencing providers of innovation platforms and techniques to sustainably and systematically provide their services to the social sector
- Encouraging NGOs, researchers, funders, and entrepreneurs focused on pro-poor innovation to use open-innovation models
Key Outcomes
This initiative uses private-sector innovation tools and methods to discover social breakthroughs that development organizations and social entrepreneurs can use to respond to the complex circumstances facing poor and vulnerable populations. We expect to achieve four outcomes:
- Test and prove which existing commercial-market models of innovation (such as crowdsourcing, design-thinking, and user-driven innovation) work as effective innovation tools for development..
- Provide NGOs and other pro-poor, not-for-profit development organizations with the necessary local and global knowledge and capacity to use innovation models to enhance the efficiency and productivity of their work.
- Enable both users and providers to replicate and scale up the use of and demand for innovation models that have a proven track record of success in addressing development problems to benefit poor communities.
- Foster partnerships between developers and providers of innovation tools and the social sector to continue sharing and demonstrating the effectiveness of socially-focused or not-for-profit innovation models.
