The International Development Innovation Alliance, which describes itself as an informal platform for knowledge exchange around development innovation, recently made insights from working groups more widely available in a series of reports.
“When we set ourselves up with the Sustainable Development Goals, there was a strong recognition among all development actors that innovation would be a key channel through which to achieve them,” said Thomas Feeny, program director at Results for Development, a nonprofit organization that manages the IDIA.
The heads of innovation from major international development organizations — including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Bank — came together to form the IDIA in 2015. They hoped that innovation would accelerate the path toward achieving the SDGs, compared to the failure to reach the Millennium Development Goals they replaced.