Introduction - UN Innovation Toolkit

• Facilitator: The person who has been in the UN the longest amount of time;
  
• Reporter: The person who has been in the UN the shortest amount of time.
  

• What innovation means to you in your own context; and
• Share your experiences of the challenges, and success factors in making innovation work in these circumstances.
  

• What innovation means to you in your own context; and
• Share your experiences of the challenges, and success factors in making innovation work in these circumstances.
  

Overview

“Begin with the end in mind” is a common refrain from strategists and designers, to architects and rocket scientists. It is an especially important concept when considering the uncertainty around innovation and the importance of ensuring innovation efforts are tied to a clear set of goals. The Headlines of the Future tool helps teams do just that. Practiced by organizations around the world, this tool is a simple technique for helping teams think through what they are hoping to achieve through innovation, and for inspiring others to buy into the ultimate goal of a particular innovation initiative.

Overview

The future is unpredictable. As global trends and emerging technologies transform the world around us at a faster pace than ever before, no one truly knows what the future may bring. What if climate change exacerbates drought and creates persistent and extreme food shortages in a particular region of the world? What if new social media tools exponentially increase the spread of fake news, leading to social unrest and rioting? Or what if increased investment flows and the discovery of new minerals like lithium create positive opportunities for rapid economic growth? How can UN organizations develop innovation strategies to plan for the future and position themselves to take advantage of new opportunities and mitigate emerging threats? The Scenario Blueprint tool helps users anticipate how trends and technologies may influence their organizational priorities, and better plan for their potential reality.

Overview

In today’s complex global development ecosystem, organizations can find it challenging to determine what type of innovation initiative they should launch to have the greatest impact. How do you make sure your efforts complement the work of others active in the space—be it in mission-facing work or operational innovation—and avoid redundancies? How do you mitigate the potential execution risks by assuring you have taken stock of potential blind spots? The most effective innovators answer these questions by regularly assessing initiatives undertaken by actors focused similar challenges or actors who may be critical to the innovation. They use this information to identify the role(s) they can play to provide the greatest value to the broader ecosystem.

Overview

With risk and discovery at its core, innovation—by nature—lacks predictability. It is difficult to know whether an attempt to turn a good idea into a scaled solution will prove successful, or how end-users will react. How can teams within the UN system gain the rewards of innovation while mitigating accompanying risks? The answer lies in part in managing innovation as a portfolio that balances risk and reward. The Portfolio Strategy tool helps organizations and teams examine whether they are taking on the right combination of projects based on their appetite for risk.

Overview

While articulating your organization’s innovation aspirations and goals is important, it is through implementation that they become a reality. Having good ideas is usually not enough. Organizations and teams often struggle to convert ideas into effective solutions, making it challenging to earn the support of stakeholders and decision-makers. Through four simple steps, the Innovation Planner tool helps you do just that, bridging the gap between innovation strategy and implementation. Using the Innovation Planner, you will create an innovation inventory, roadmap, and resource plan to help better position your team or organization to implement its innovation strategy.

Overview

Partnerships are a critical component of innovation. This is especially true across the UN system, where ambitious sustainable development goals are made possible only through strategic partnerships with the public, private, and social sectors. Effective partners focus on generating collective impact – impact they would otherwise not be able to achieve on their own. They help advance mutual goals and innovation by complementing one another’s strengths and weaknesses, unlocking new opportunities and capabilities, and sharing risks. And yet, engaging and attracting the right partners can be challenging – especially for innovation efforts which often require new and different partnership approaches. The Value Proposition tool helps you clarify your unique value and attract partners to meet your strategic innovation objectives.

Overview

Partnerships are critical to innovation, but it is often difficult to know who the right partners are. Often, you form partnerships with organizations you know, but these types of partnerships can fall short of providing the support needed to drive innovation. The Find Different Partners tool can help you identify nontraditional innovation partners to enhance your capabilities, reach new end users, and find collaborative solutions that may be otherwise difficult to achieve.

Overview

Nontraditional partners can offer differentiated capabilities that spark new ideas or solutions, but these partnerships may also involve a higher level of financial and operational risks. Careful design is required to mitigate these risks. The Prepare to Partner tool enables users to perform a premortem analysis to identify and manage common risks associated with an innovative partnership before they occur, rather than at the end of the partnership.

Overview

All partnerships require time and resources, but innovation partnerships require more than most due to their complexity, need for close collaboration in ideation and testing, and the investment of physical assets to pilot and scale new solutions.

• In the UN environment, where time and resources are scarce, it is particularly important that expenditures, including those dedicated to partnerships, maximize measurable value.
• The Prioritize and Select Partners tool can help you make informed decisions when sorting through potential partners, as well as ensure the partners you select meet the UN’s standards and organizational demands.

Overview

Innovation requires the generation of new ideas. Most organizations assume that good ideas develop organically, but that assumption does not always translate into reality. Many effective innovators are deliberate and systematic in their approach to sourcing new ideas, which is especially critical in an environment as vast and diverse as the UN where identifying the right quantity and types of ideas requires involving a broad range of stakeholders and making the most of limited resources. The Scan the Horizon tool helps you source ideas to advance your innovation goals. The tool should not prevent or discourage organic idea sourcing, but instead provide guidance on structured tactics you can use to collect innovative ideas that target specific challenges and opportunities.

Overview

The most effective innovative solutions reflect the characteristics, needs and challenges of their intended end users. User-centered design (UCD) can help you engage in a collaborative process to create innovative solutions with your end users, as opposed to delivering solutions to them, whether they are beneficiaries, field staff, or operational officers. UCD techniques are grounded in ethnography, psychology, and design to help you address the culture, behaviors, and expectations of end users. Consider using UCD techniques across the innovation life cycle, especially when identifying challenges and turning innovative ideas into testable solutions. The User-Centered Design tool provides a collection of techniques to help you gather critical end user data, synthesize this data, identify themes, and derive insights to inform the innovation process.

Overview

Scaling innovation — driving adoption beyond the initial pilot’s target population — is widely regarded as the most difficult stage of the innovation life cycle. Nearly 90 percent of private sector start-ups fail when they attempt to scale. In the public sector, scaling is even more challenging due to risk-averse decision makers, resource limitations or unpredictability, and programmatic continuity issues that may result from changing political cycles. In many cases, the failure to scale can be traced to early missteps during the pilot planning process. The From Pilot to Scale tool is designed to help you avoid these common missteps by capturing critical information to support scaling at the beginning of the innovation life cycle.

Overview

People often treat innovation as an organic process. They assume that if a group of creative people are given the freedom to innovate, they will inevitably generate ideas that could lead to new solutions. However, while organic innovation can be successful, innovation is far more likely to be effective and impactful when it is treated as a discipline like strategic planning or budgeting and linked to organizational structures and processes that allow it to be adequately integrated, resourced, and sustained over time. The Operating Model tool is designed to help you organize your team, unit, or organization for innovation once a clear set of innovation goals have been agreed upon and set in place.

Overview

Innovation, by its nature, involves experimentation. While many innovation efforts successfully meet or exceed expectations, some may fail. But even failures can provide valuable insights that can be used to inform future efforts. While failures tend to be less accepted and openly discussed, it is vital to document and learn from these experiences. The practice of learning from both successes and failures begins with cultivating an environment where the fear of failure does not inhibit innovation. This requires a shift in the cultural mindset of an organization to value all experimentation — whether it ends in success or failure — as an opportunity for learning and growth. In such organizations, senior leaders empower staff to take risks, ask questions, discuss failures, and assess what they learned.

Overview

A culture that encourages habitual curiosity, creativity, and risk taking is critical for innovation. But for most organizations, this culture does not come naturally; instead, it needs a push start. Incentives and opportunities can help kick start this change. Rewarding staff members for their innovative efforts can shift ad hoc, outlier innovative behavior into a central characteristic of an organization’s culture. All individuals have unique motivations and values, but many individuals may be more innovative when they can engage in projects that interest them. Rewarding innovative staff members with opportunities to choose their own direction, learn new skills, or work on projects that align with their interests may galvanize innovative behaviors. When it comes to motivating new behaviors, monetary incentives are traditionally very effective. However there are also non-financial incentive mechanisms that are increasingly being used to strengthen staff performance, and these mechanisms are particularly useful when operating in a budget constrained environment. The Create Incentives and Opportunities tool highlights non-monetary techniques you can use to motivate staff to innovate and, ultimately, build a culture that fosters innovation within your organization.

Overview

Strategic risk taking is essential to innovation. But organizational risk tolerances are often not well defined or well communicated. This may lead to missed opportunities to implement new solutions, or hamper risk taking altogether. The Define Strategic Risks tool can help you better understand the risk tolerance of your organization, as well as provide guidance on how to manage these limits most effectively to garner support for innovation.

Overview

The United Nations (UN) system shares information and makes decisions through a complex web of governance and oversight structures, including country-level coordination mechanisms, fund and program executive boards, and intergovernmental bodies. For your innovation to move forward beyond early planning, you must secure buy-in from applicable governing bodies. Since innovation involves creating or doing something new or different, conventional engagement techniques often do not work. The Engage Governing Bodies tool can help you plan your techniques for obtaining critical buy-in from governing bodies and obtain the resources you need for your innovation effort.

Overview

Every day there are individuals working tirelessly across the UN system to come up with new and creative ways to improve the lives of their colleagues and beneficiaries and to advance their mission. Yet all too often, innovation fails—not because of the quality of an idea but, rather, how that idea is shared. In many cases, the storytelling around an innovation—why the innovation matters and what difference it can make —can be the ultimate arbiter of whether an idea succeeds or fails. The UN System has a complex network of stakeholders, including internal leadership, staff, donors, Member States, beneficiaries, and partners, each with its unique information needs. It is therefore imperative to communicate effectively with this range of stakeholders to generate enthusiasm and sustain engagement for innovation activities. Effective communication requires a deep understanding of stakeholder preferences and interests, as well as the differentiated methods of communication that will resonate with each group. Teams should seek to deploy novel methods of communication that capture attention and articulate important information efficiently in a limited amount of time. And communication efforts should be deliberate, strategic, and aligned to broader programmatic, team, or organizational goals. The Innovation Storytelling tool helps users construct a cohesive story for their innovation efforts, identify the different audiences for this story and their unique characteristics, and select the proper methods and channels to communicate with these stakeholders. Ultimately, users will be able to craft a compelling story for their innovation efforts that inspires their audience and serves as a call to action for stakeholders both inside and outside the UN.

Overview

Great ideas often fall short of their potential because they fail to scale. In fact, 90 percent of ideas fail before they mature because they are not effectively developed. However, by applying criteria to inform go and no-go decisions throughout the innovation life cycle, users can improve their likelihood of success at scale. Stage-gate methodology—applied by many organizations, from Lego to the National Research Council of Canada—is a proven approach to accelerate time to scale and to maximize impact. The Stage-Gate Assessment tool leverages this methodology to help users inform decisions about ideas as they progress across the four phases of the Innovation Life Cycle.

Overview

It has been estimated that as many as 95 percent of innovations fail to meet stakeholder expectations. Why? Because many organizations lack the discipline and structures to turn their ideas into fully-scaled solutions. In fact, it may take some organizations as many as 3,000 ideas to develop a single successful solution. Organizations and teams can improve these odds by regularly analyzing their innovation process and putting in place systems and structures to support the progression of ideas through each stage of development—from conception to scale. The Life Cycle Analysis tool can help you assess your organization’s or team’s innovation process—also known as the innovation life cycle—in both its entirety and within its component stages.

Overview

While good ideas may come and go, fostering the right kind of environment is what allows an organization or team to sustain innovation over time. Just as a team or organization should assess the performance of their innovation projects and portfolios, they should also evaluate how effective their organizational architecture, culture, and partnerships are at enabling innovation. However, these systems are often complex, seemingly intangible, and difficult to measure. As a result, many evaluation efforts fall short of pinpointing specific areas for improvement and further investment. The Enabling Environment Scan helps users overcome these challenges by providing a means for periodically surveying staff perceptions of their organization’s or team’s culture, architecture, and partnerships.