Summary
International development organisations manage significant global resources, with Official Development Assistance (ODA) totalling around $212 billion per year. Despite this, innovation efforts often suffer from “”perpetual pilotitis”” and remain uncoordinated and scattered, leading to a misalignment between goals and actual investment practices. Scaling successful interventions in this complex environment is a messy, non-linear process that can take 10 to 15 years in sectors like health and agriculture. The traditional “”raise funds, give to those in need, rinse and repeat”” model is proving insufficient for achieving the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Recognising this need, the OECD’s Innovation for Development Facility (INDEF) collaborated with consultancy EDA to apply an Enterprise Design approach at the level of National Development Agencies, specifically leveraging EDGY for collaboratively developing the “”Innovation Portfolio Service””. This service is a structured, iterative process designed to help international development agencies rethink and evolve their portfolio of innovation investments. It guides development agencies through key strategic conversations: “”what matters,”” “”what we are doing,”” the crucial “”so what?”” (analysing alignment), and “”now what”” (planning future action). Beyond designing for multiple layers of users all the way to aid recipients and beneficiaries, understanding these public enterprises, their organisational systems and investment processes, their deeply interdependent programs compared to stated strategic purposes proved crucial. Since rolling out the service, it has a significant uptake, by now visible in Iceland’s diversification of innovation investments, and other observable portfolio redistribution. Our service also facilitates transformational scaling, moving beyond “”more of the same”” to shaping local market conditions and ecosystems, exemplified by cases from Kenya, Ghana and Uganda. It empowers innovation teams to advocate for policy and process changes, leading to a more strategic and impactful use of development investments globally. This work directly engages with both organisational performance (overcoming barriers to strategic investment) and service performance (influencing how aid programmes deliver measurable outcomes at varying scales).
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