Setting up ‘Innovation as a Service’ within a large international NGO
Innovation for an equal world — our journey and reflections
Plan International is a development and humanitarian organisation with a mission to advance children’s rights and equality for girls in over 75 countries. For us, innovation is about creating paradigm-shifting products, services and initiatives for social impact, driven by girls’ and young women’s needs. I joined the Innovation Hub @ Plan International at the very start of our journey and what a journey it has been. This blog shares what we did, what we learned and five reflections.
Our work setting up ‘Innovation as a Service’ involves coaching teams around the world to think bigger and bolder about creating an equal world. It involves encouraging colleagues to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, to be brave to say when we don’t have the answers, and to be humble in accepting that we still have a long way to go in achieving transformative change for girls and their communities.
Empathy remains critical for innovation, but humility is important too. Practicing humility can help us all become better innovation professionals.
Launching the Innovation Team, Fund & Network
It was 2018 when Plan International realised that if we were going to deliver the ambition of our global strategy — to transform the lives of 100 million girls; we needed to do things differently. And so, we quickly invested in a new innovation team and fund to provide human-centred design expertise and innovation acumen to help our offices in 70+ countries transform their offering, as well as their own structures and ways of working. The innovation team are set up to:
- Create bold and impactful new ways to ensure girls and young women have access to the full scope of human rights; including being the drivers of impact in their lives and communities
- Develop bold ways to influence formal power structures, people and places — from the UN, through to local community leaders and parents
- Design more effective ways of working
- Disrupt our funding structure and pipeline
Disrupting how an international NGO with 11,000+ staff operates and totally rewiring its programming and influencing offering with just a team of four is totally doable, no? It will be easy to shake up an organisation that has existed for over 80 years, right? It’s been some journey.
So, what did we do?
Step one was launching the Innovation Fund, which we administer. The Innovation Fund is an internal, flexible grant that anyone from Plan International offices around the world can apply to. This is seed funding to explore problems and opportunities, prototype ideas and run pilots. It’s reserved for projects that embrace experimentation and risk-taking where there is potential for significant impact and scale. We’ve received over 115 applications and have launched 28 innovation projects in programmes, influencing, fundraising and operations.
Our innovation portfolio includes everything from commercial venues for young entrepreneurs to develop and sell high-quality products in El Salvador… to creating tailored job support for Plan International staff that bridges the gap between our many policy documents and the realities of working in rural Uganda. Examples of our priority projects include:
“Girls Out Loud”, a safe digital space where girls discuss key gender issues, learn about their rights and lead the discussion.
Girls are asking questions and discussing topics such as self-image, gender-based violence and early pregnancies. Our social listening dashboard, created in collaboration with IBM and Accenture, analyses the discussions in the groups using artificial intelligence. These real-time insights allow us to know what issues are most important to girls, right now, and we are using this information to drive our programming.
Following a successful implementation in Colombia with over 1000 girls taking part, we are now scaling to over 20 countries as part of our Covid-19 response efforts. More to come on scaling this project from Anneli Westerberg who leads on all things digital design.
“Equality Accelerator” is enabling and catalysing youth-led collective action for gender equality through connecting girl and young women-led collectives with flexible funding sources, technical knowledge, and a community of peers. Check out the digital platform which is now live in Guatemala and Brazil:
We love this project because it supports redistributing power away from traditional structures and towards the young people who are driving change in their communities. Follow Stef Monaco our expert in social innovation and gender for updates!
We also created a network of innovation champions — a virtual community for over 1,600 colleagues from around the world to share ideas and inspiration, challenge each other and provide updates. The network allows colleagues to share openly and celebrate successes, failures and learnings (even when most have never met in person).
We launched ‘Innovation Heroes’ — an initiative to spread the message that anyone, at any level, in any office can innovate. Colleagues in 16 countries from Nigeria to Indonesia and Nicaragua to Burkina Faso were recognised for building their knowledge and skills.
Transparency on what we’re learning, seeing and hearing is crucial to ensure we bring the organisation along with us. With this in mind, we recently live-streamed our innovation portfolio update with the Global Leadership Team to the wider organisation so that any member of staff can watch, comment and ask questions.
If we’re serious about creating a culture which allows for innovation, experimentation and learning from failure, we have to walk the talk so others feel comfortable to do the same.
What are our key reflections so far?
1. “Think big, start small, seek impact”
The innovation team spends a lot of time coaching teams to develop a bolder vision, start projects on a small scale and to experiment in an agile way. Naturally, our team’s value proposition has morphed in the past two years as we’ve trialled supporting all sorts of requests and learned what is most valuable. Instead of trying to support all requests, we’ve raised the bar for applications to the innovation fund and requests for our support so we can prioritize the most impactful ideas. This means our team no longer focuses on incremental innovations, instead we signpost to methods and local partners for those teams to get going.
2. Girls lead, we follow
Human-centered design methods can be extractive so we’ve developed girl-centered methods to ensure girls and young women living in fragile, crisis, and low-resource contexts are at the centre of all design decisions and that they can lead in a way that is valuable and accessible for them.
This involves recognising that practitioners are not ‘researchers in the field’, we are privileged guests in girls’ lives. More to come soon from Stef Monaco on how these methods can help uncover in-depth, authentic insights whilst understanding the systems, factors, and actors that impact girls and young women.
3. Time to embrace the idea is key
Most colleagues are used to designing big multi-year large scale programmes, not rapid prototyping with quicker changes in direction happening in weeks or months. The innovation process is iterative and agile so we can only move on when we’re ready and we need the time to continue exploring until we’ve found the right idea. Innovation projects often require bringing in specialized external expertise that doesn’t exist in-house. If we rush, we won’t achieve best quality. Creating an Innovation Fund has been crucial in ensuring flexibility so that teams are not bound by strict financial reporting. Although some things could (and should) have happened yesterday, if we don’t respect the time required for offices and leadership to embrace the idea and new way of working, we will fail (fast) for the wrong reasons.
4. The magic formula for disruptive ideas?
‘Big bet’ innovation projects have come directly from youth activists, bottom-up from staff, and top-down from leadership. We haven’t found a magic formula for sourcing radical or disruptive innovations. We’re looking to source more ideas externally and will soon be testing out a decentralised innovation capability in the West and Central Africa region. This will explore opportunities more closely with the local ecosystem of design agencies, start-ups, iHubs and entrepreneur networks.
5. It’s not just about empathy, humility is also important
Empathy is of course crucial to understanding the lived realities of who we are designing for. These are complex problems and systems we’re operating in and the projects are difficult. They require colleagues to be humble about what they don’t know, constantly question assumptions, and to be open about not knowing how it will work, or even if it will work. We all have to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. For this, humility is also required. Exploring questions of power, privilege and feminist leadership means we are constantly learning and unlearning our own biases and assumptions. We must continue to do this if we are serious about innovating for social impact.
Innovation for an equal world.
A world where girls can learn, lead, decide and thrive. Where girls have power in all decisions affecting their lives, where they are safe to speak up without fear and harassment, and where the world stops promoting stereotypes.
The journey must continue…
We’d love to learn from you. Follow the Innovation Hub @ Plan International, share your comments or get in touch innovation@plan-international.org!
