Chasing Ghosts: How the focus on innovation in development has gone down the wrong path

[Editor’s Note: This blog is the first in a series hosted by R4D’s Scaling Innovations practice, which aims to advance the effective integration of innovation solutions for health, education and nutrition. Over the coming months, we will explore the challenges and lessons associated with the design, implementation and evaluation of innovation programs, labs and partnerships with an eye toward tangible insights and practical guidance for others engaged in doing development differently around the world.]

Soon after the ink dried on world leaders’ ambitious commitments in 2015 to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, thoughtful observers pointed out that the goals could not be achieved by simply ramping up the best approaches known then. New solutions — better, faster or more affordable — would have to be found and applied widely across Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as in high-income countries.

The importance of innovation in international development, already a familiar refrain for decades, has received even more attention since the adoption of the SDGs. But while global dialogue about innovation has proselytized in terms of the power of doing things differently, in most sectors, we remain seemingly stuck in an endless cycle of pilots, hype and showcases. And we often have little to show in terms of sustained gains and improved access to services for the poorest and most vulnerable.

Why the continued cycle of discovery, overhype and disappointment? Current thinking suggests either a market failure centered on access to financing (“we need more money to scale”) or a positioning breakdown (“social entrepreneurs can only take things so far, and government is dropping the ball”). Based on new research, we suggest a more fundamental disconnect in the current work to leverage innovation to drive development outcomes: the continued fetishization of the breakthrough “innovation” as the most important unit of analysis.

Current thinking on innovation for development

Conventional wisdom on how the international development community should embrace innovation as a key to improved and sustained outcomes generally flows as follows:

Step A: Stimulate key actors (often social entrepreneurs) to develop and test improved approaches to solving problems (thus the continued proliferation of various prizes and challenge funds).

Step B: Ease the way for those innovators to find financing to support their new approaches.

Step C: Scale up “the good ones” from interesting pilots to robust system-wide game-changers; and then,

Step D: Help decision-makers with access to system-wide financing, often in the public sector, make the right choices when determining which innovations to bet on and mainstream.

Contemporary writing on (and “doing of”) innovation often presumes that previous thinkers never thought much about it. In fact, emphasis on the power of innovation has been around a very long time in the development discourse, though with different monikers. When international development work suddenly took off soon after World War II, writers such as Walt Rostow (The Stages of Economic Growth) were espousing innovation and “doing development differently” every bit as much as today’s thinkers — and perhaps even more so because their ideas had more concrete advice on what needed to be done.  Successive waves of ideas — on how to radically change agricultural development, why economic growth is so important, or how performance-based financing could change the world (obvious examples include the works of Albert Hirschman and Joseph Schumpeter) — were no less founded on a belief in innovation.

Through the years, however, one constant has been the belief that by simply uncovering the next “silver bullet” for development, we could quickly make the leap from step C above (identifying the “good ones”) to step D (turning the good ones into business as usual across a given sector). It turns out that automaticity is not nearly as predictable as we would like it to be.

New research from Results for Development on the role of “translators” in the evidence-informed policy ecosystem (that is, the growing field focused on the role of evidence in data-driven policymaking) paints a far more complex picture concerning that aspired-for jump from step C to step D above. Based on in-depth case studies in multiple countries and a wide-ranging literature review, researchers found that:

• The translator skills described as most critical [to effectively shepherd compelling evidence into sustained policy and behavioral changes] were political savvy and stakeholder engagement — two skills that are closely connected.
• The [research] did not [emphasis added] identify analytical skills and the ability to adapt, transform and communicate evidence as important stand-alone translator skills.
• While the research did not explicitly validate the importance of some of the skills that are typically considered key to evidence translation (e.g. analytical skills), development partners should prioritize working with individuals and organizations known for their credibility and political savvy.

Within the context of innovation in international development, these findings might be glibly summarized as, “TED talks matter more than randomized control trials.” That is, the continued obsession with finding the new “what works” solution may be quickly trumped by decision-makers’ tendencies to back solutions based on who surfaces them rather than what the evidentiary basis says about the same solution. This somewhat dispiriting finding may help to explain why “pilotitis” continues to dominate the innovation landscape in international development. As a community, we are likely promoting and backing too many innovations because of the personalities behind them and/or the reputation of the intermediaries who bring them to light. Harder evidence surrounding efficacy and potential to scale may be diminished or ignored as a consequence.

There are two simple but important takeaways from this analysis for boosters of innovation in international development:

1. We need to focus more explicitly on the strategic communications skills and political savvy of our entrepreneurs. Simply showcasing them at glitzy events or on websites is insufficient; these entrepreneurs need to be able to earn the trust and respect of decision-makers in positions of power (often inside of public sector institutions). This takes time, coalition building, practice, repeated failure (and subsequent course corrections), and coaching. Investing in those soft skills may be equally or more important than investing in additional innovations themselves.
2. Funders of development innovation may want to more seriously weigh the costs and benefits of continuing to flood the market with “the next new thing in [fill in the blank for your favorite sector].” Given the serious and chronic challenges associated with scaling up promising innovations (and the corollary challenges of porting and adapting successful innovations from an initial and often unique political-economy context), are new and additional challenge funds and prize-driven innovation contests really the best return on investment? Instead of focusing on generating more step A solutions, perhaps investing in better understanding the transition from step C to step D is where our collective attention should increasingly focus.

We hope this blog series will stimulate discussion, change minds and inform action. We want to hear your thoughts on the role and potential of innovation within your work, and we encourage you to comment below.

Stay tuned for the next blog in this series, which will look at learnings from the LAUNCH Food experiment and how innovation can catalyze systemic change for food systems.

Photo © Karen Dias for CHMI/Ziqitza Healthcare Ltd