How UN Global Pulse is Transforming Into a Hub for Experimentation
A brief overview of UNGP’s 2022 strategy and goals of our evolving mission.
This article was written to reflect UNGP’s 2022 strategy and goals — since then, the team has evolved and additional updates on our work can be found on our soon-to-be-launched global website. Stay tuned for more.
By Talea von Lupin, Data Policy Analyst, Strategy Lead.
The UN isn’t standing still — because the world certainly isn’t. It’s more urgent than ever to be agile and responsive in a world that’s rapidly changing, where conflict, poverty, climate change, and more increasingly threaten humanity. Working together as a global family to solve these complex problems and build a more sustainable, future-oriented UN is a cornerstone of the UN’s Common Agenda — and UN Global Pulse (UNGP) is now supporting the transformation envisioned by UN leadership.
That requires UNGP to reimagine ourselves accordingly. After a thorough strategic evaluation, UNGP is shifting our focus from big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to a broader effort. We’re becoming the Secretary-General’s innovation lab — a cross-pillar lead and hub for experimentation and digital innovation across the UN family and its partners.
Innovation is the engine that can drive the necessary transformation across the UN, which includes a continued focus on the UN Common Agenda. But it’s even bigger than that, and UNGP is prepared to guide the UN family as it embraces holistic innovation. Working at the intersection of digital innovation and the human sciences, our mission is to inform, inspire, and strengthen the ability of the UN and the people it serves to anticipate, respond, and adapt to the challenges of today and tomorrow.
Moving forward, UNGP is focused on three strategic priorities to guide the UN family as we innovate together for our common future:
- Imagine: We must identify why challenges are persistent and redefine challenges — including envisioning those that might arise in the future — as well as the UN’s role in them. Imagination empowers us to question alternatives to current systems and tools and create new futures by asking, “What else might there be?”
- Build: We are the solution development space, where people from multidisciplinary backgrounds work on developing people and planet-centric solutions to challenges our UN family and partners identify or anticipate. It goes beyond talking and thinking about solutions, but rolling up our sleeves every day to build, test, and re-build solutions.
- Mobilise: A solution is only the beginning of innovation. Transformation requires bringing together all of the stakeholders needed to drive change, within the UN family and those we partner with. This is not only an organizational change, it’s a culture change, which requires even more collaboration and broad buy-in.
Big data and AI remain part of UNGP’s work — but innovation reaches far beyond technology. That’s why UNGP will run programmes in high-priority areas, which are subject to change based on needs and demands. Innovation is an iterative process, which is essential to being a flexible, responsive organization.
Right now, UNGP’s high-priority areas are:
- Inclusion, by finding new ways to measure inequity and eliminate exclusion.
- Crisis prevention and response, through experimentation and increased response capacity.
- Fair digital commons, through initiating and expanding new digital infrastructures and public goods.
- Restoring trust, by building trustworthy digital ecosystems and reducing risks in digital technologies.
- UN transformation, by supporting the UN 2.0 Quintet of Change. The five capabilities for transformation include:
- Data, analysis, and communications that benefit people and the planet.
- Innovation that maximises the effect of new approaches and creates pathways to sustainability.
- Strategic foresight that helps us anticipate emerging global challenges.
- Digital approaches and tools that create value in a changing world.
- Behavioural science that guides more effective programs and policies while reducing bureaucracy.
UNGP invites the UN family and our partners to bring us the problems they find most challenging or anticipate on the horizon. Please reach out to us, as our mission is now to be a space where the UN and its partners imagine, build, and mobilise novel approaches in pursuit of achieving our goals for the future.
