Catalysing Good Ideas to Scale is Essential to Achieving Results
By Ahmed El Saeed, Team Lead, and Patricia Loh, Senior Analyst, Innovation Scaling Team
At UN Global Pulse, the UN Secretary-General’s Innovation Lab, we support and advance the UN Charter, specifically the UN 2.0 Quintet of Change. In particular, we are here to help all parts of the UN reimagine how they can be more nimble and relevant. It’s part of the larger goal of making sure the UN is better prepared to anticipate and address the challenges of the future.
As the members of the Innovation Scaling Team, which launched nearly two years ago, our initial focus was on solving a dilemma UN Global Pulse faces: We do a lot of pilots, but they rarely go to scale. Once we established a good understanding of pain points and key enablers to scaling at Global Pulse, we were then tasked with looking at the wider UN system. After all, our challenges in scaling innovations are no different than those faced by other agencies. In fact, we were surprised by how similar their challenges are, such as defining what innovation or scaling really means to them, and marrying the definitions of innovation and scaling with their organizational priorities.
To gain an even deeper understanding of shared challenges and opportunities across the UN, we commissioned UN-wide research that began in mid-2021. It resulted in an evidence-based report on potential interventions UN Global Pulse can spearhead to help other members of the UN family address concrete needs and achieve their goals.
Our research led to the introduction of the Scale Catalyst, which is a UN Global Pulse collaborative service offering for the larger UN family. There are three key aspects to this offering: helping innovation teams realise their scale aspirations, providing bespoke support to build innovation capability, and advocating for cross-agency collaboration. Ultimately, it’s about catalysing innovations to realise impacts at scale. The word “catalysing” is important, because we’re not the ones scaling these innovations — it’s our colleagues at UN agencies who are actually doing the work. We’re here to help them enhance the impact of their innovations, with one goal being improving their ability to achieve their programmatic goals.
UNIDO puts Global Pulse’s Scale Catalyst to work
The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) is a specialised agency of the UN with a unique mandate to promote, dynamize, and accelerate industrial development. UNIDO’s Director General champions transformation efforts for UNIDO to drive “progress by innovation,” in keeping with the goals of UN 2.0 as outlined by the UN Secretary-General.
UNIDO has recently established its Innovation Lab, called InnoLab, a new initiative that aims to foster collaboration and novel approaches to drive positive change. UN Global Pulse was one of the initial innovation partners they approached, as they were interested in learning how we’ve introduced innovation management, the challenges we’ve seen in trying to scale innovations, and cooperating with us to set up their own innovation structure.
We began our work with UNIDO late last year, with several consultations to prepare for our first meeting in December. We met with senior UNIDO leadership and some key senior representatives of directorates there, to talk about their work in innovation and how it’s being perceived and carried out at UNIDO. Being a small team, we were joined by Marketta Gland, our Head of Programmes, and Ian Gray, Portfolio Senior Advisor (Innovation Scaling). During our consultations, we did a lot of experience-sharing — what worked for us and what did not — while also trying to contextualise ideas for UNIDO’s own purposes.
In the end, we developed a collaboration plan with the InnoLab team. We outlined three preliminary areas of capability-building: an incubator program, a scale accelerator program — which is closely aligned to our Scale Catalyst work — and a fellowship within UNIDO. Ultimately, we agreed our primary collaboration will be supporting them with our Scale Catalyst offering.
Moving the collaboration forward
We stayed in close contact with UNIDO before returning to Vienna in February for a one-day workshop. The InnoLab team invited colleagues from across UNIDO departments to join the workshop, with the goal of engaging a wider UNIDO audience to enrich the conversation and bring in different perspectives about how InnoLab can help them deliver on their objectives and departmental goals.
We used a value proposition canvas to guide a conversation to develop a value proposition for InnoLab everyone could agree on. Simply put, who will it serve and how will they benefit from the services the lab will offer? After getting ideas on what they’re proposing as the incubator program, we spent the second half of the day on the scale accelerator program. The plan is that these two programs will exist side by side as two ends of the innovation funnel: incubating good ideas and accelerating them to scale for impact.
With our UNIDO colleagues in the lead, we had an opportunity to serve as enablers and facilitators for creating a space where needs and good ideas meet to create the basis for their innovation agenda. After our initial work together, we have a clear roadmap for InnoLab and greater buy-in from departments across UNIDO. This isn’t the end of the road, but an excellent starting point for their project.
This collaboration with UNIDO is exciting, because it’s the first of its kind in terms of how hands-on we are with our Scale Catalyst work. We also think this is a win-win. UNIDO is getting the support they need and UN Global Pulse is assisting in their goals with a positive service offering. These two wins create the kind of constructive process we need to transform the UN into an ambidextrous entity that innovates better to deliver better.
