CARE's approach to innovation? Proximity to the problem is key

SAN FRANCISCO — When Dar Vanderbeck joined CARE as chief innovation officer two years ago, she spent the first six months trying to understand where innovation was already happening, and what stood in the way. A survey revealed that 86 percent of staff felt they had transformational ideas, but only 16 percent felt CARE was a place that could support them in this. Taking stock of this, the Innovation Team at CARE USA launched with two main objectives: To experiment with changes to its core operating model, and to make innovation easier for everyone at the organization. “The international NGO mindset tends to focus on scarcity, and when there is scarcity, we tend to double down on what we know,” Vanderbeck told Devex. “We’re at this really interesting inflection point at CARE where people realize the world is changing at a terrifying pace, and we need to ride this wave in a different way, and it’s important to have people who can understand the challenge and can develop a process of turning ideas into experiments and breakthroughs.” CARE is a global humanitarian organization focused on saving lives, achieving social justice, and ending poverty. One of the benefits of being one of the last INGOs to invest in innovation was that CARE was able to learn from its peers, Vanderbeck said. And what she decided to prioritize was leadership development so that CARE’s country office staff could develop solutions closer to the problems they were trying to solve. Vanderbeck has faced some pushback in the way she built the innovation team. “A lot of people believed it should be a firewalled team creating the future,” she said, but she felt it was important for everyone at CARE to feel a sense of ownership. “You identify leaders who often aren’t in leadership positions, you build community around their leadership, and you build power out of that community to change a system.” --— Dar Vanderbeck, chief innovation officer at CARE “You identify leaders who often aren’t in leadership positions, you build community around their leadership, and you build power out of that community to change a system,” she said. “If a global system of changemakers armed with the most cutting edge whatever-it-is is our best fighting chance at our mission statement, then that is the direction we should go in.” The CARE Innovation Team has worked to create a space to test new ideas free from bureaucracy, and support ideas that can scale, working primarily with country offices and program staff. Vanderbeck sets the strategic vision for innovation at CARE together with an Innovation Core Team. They work to break out of the technology-focused paradigm that tends to drive innovation at most NGOs and instead pursue a community organizing framework to innovation. “By creating language and a position and a team around innovation, that opened up the space for communication in an otherwise very decentralized organization, where communication can be really difficult,” Vanderbeck said. Innovation at CARE breaks down into three different buckets. One is R+D, or research and design, which seeks out new ways to achieve the CARE mission across sectors and disciplines, and is led by Josh Harvey in Atlanta, United States. Another is Innovation Hubs, led by Tim Bishop in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, which builds connectivity between CARE’s growing network of innovation hubs worldwide, with a focus in 2018 on the Philippines, the Palestinian territories, and Egypt. The third is The Launch Pad, led by Rebecca Holliday, director of partnerships and operations, in San Francisco, U.S., and Mark Malhotra, senior adviser for innovation and scale, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. “The best solutions come from proximity to challenges we’re trying to solve,” Vanderbeck said of the way the R+D team focuses on programming in country offices, with a growing number of innovation fellows at its offices around the world. “CARE is really good at pilots, but we’re not as good as what happens before that, so we’re getting more creative experiments into the pipeline organizationwide.” Vanderbeck came to CARE with a lot of skepticism about innovation hubs. There are far too many examples of NGO headquarters saying, “Let’s have a glass office with Post-it notes all around it,” she said. But there were examples of grassroots innovation labs taking off across CARE, so the question for Vanderbeck and the innovation team became how to support these local ecosystems. For example, CARE’s country director in the Philippines wanted support from the innovation team around the challenge of coordination in disaster preparedness and typhoon response in a country with thousands of islands. So the NGO formed a consortium of humanitarian organizations calling for ideas. Winning ideas would receive 1 million pesos ($20,000) worth of seed funding, training, and support, including coworking spaces and connections with Filipino experts. This represents one way CARE is trying to move toward a model where they are not always the doers, but rather pursuing solutions that are rooted in local wisdom, with the organization serving as a coordinating body. The Launch Pad is home to a number of initiatives, each representing ways that CARE is transforming its own model to achieve impact at scale. It incubates some of the instruments that come out of teams like R+D. Vanderbeck said it is an example of how CARE is trying to transform the way it works in order to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals together with partners. “Will an INGO or traditional development funding ever be able to achieve the SDGs? Definitely not,” she said. “We need to look at CARE’s model and move away from brick and mortar, where we have an office and give grants, and ask what are the different structures and instruments and pathways we need to achieve our mission?” The solution the CARE team came up with looks like a decentralized web of connected dots, with a global presence and ties into communities. For example, CARE Consulting is a social impact consulting practice; CARE Enterprises is a $30 million impact investing fund; and the Philanthropists’ Innovation Initiative brings women philanthropists together with CARE country offices to develop solutions for women and girls, in a model that grew out of a relationship with Population Services International to scale its philanthropic initiative Maverick Collective. “Our mission is really to be the sector’s accelerator.” --— Dar Vanderbeck, chief innovation officer at CARE Then there is the SXD Accelerator, also known as Scale X Design, which has the Innovation Team all hands on deck this week as part of its accelerator bootcamp, ahead of a pitch night in Silicon Valley next week. The platform draws inspiration from private sector approaches to help development practitioners both within and outside CARE turn their ideas into impact. The curriculum covers human-centered design, Lean Start Up, impact investing, innovation and intellectual property, pitching, and marketing to the base of the pyramid. “There are tons of amazing pilots, but when we talk about sustainability, there is no one ramp to do that,” Vanderbeck said of the reason for Scale X Design. “That is especially true in our sector where people are doing project-based work in country.” Prior to launching the accelerator, CARE reviewed the 600 accelerators and incubators that already existed worldwide, and could not find a single example of a model that worked with project-based teams in international development. “We approached this from a partnerships place, but there was a complete gap, which was fascinating,” Vanderbeck said. This year, CARE opened up its cohort to include not only its own staff, but also staff from the World Wide Fund for Nature and Habitat for Humanity. “Our mission is really to be the sector’s accelerator,” she said. These innovations are focused on serving the world’s poorest people, and their pathways to scale will not necessarily be as a business but could come through partnerships with NGOs, work with governments, or even social movements. The way the Innovation Team works with the rest of CARE is something they are currently framing as “creativity as a service.” Oftentimes, the teams that approach them are donor driven, hoping to throw the mention of innovation into a request for proposal, so that they are more likely to get the project. The CARE Innovation Team works with them to shift their mode of thinking so they get to a place of constant experimentation. Increasingly, CARE is also looking for ways to position itself as a partner in innovation to NGO peers. Last month, the INGO organized a cash innovation challenge in San Francisco. They convened actors from the private sector, NGO community, and institutional donors to come up with solutions for humanitarian cash programming, and CARE will continue to convene discussions and drive solutions following up on the challenges and opportunities that came up in conversation. “My early instinct was that taking the skunkworks approach to innovation, a firewalled innovation team, was not going to work at CARE,” she said. So much of the sector has focused on technical solutions with their innovation initiatives — but CARE’s mission is ending poverty, and while technology can be transformative, it shouldn’t drive the strategy, Vanderbeck said. “When you look under the hood, a lot of innovation initiatives not just in our sector but elsewhere are still underwritten by what is basically a charity mindset,” she added. “We’re called right now — and I will die on my hill on this one at CARE — to subvert that.” Read more Devex coverage on innovation.