Innovation at Pact: Working on 'permissionless innovation' across 40 countries

WASHINGTON — Michelle Risinger, innovation director at Pact, joined the international NGO in 2013 from the American Red Cross, where she worked in Iraq and Afghanistan. “All we did was real-time problem solving and firefighting — ‘I have to solve this problem right now because someone’s life depends on it’ — but we don’t have that same type of real-time urgency in development,” she said. Working with the Red Cross, Risinger was dealing with matters of life or death that required decisions in the moment. She expected that moving from humanitarian response to international development would allow her to focus on innovation in a way that was not possible in the midst of a crisis zone. But since joining Pact, an NGO working with impoverished and marginalized communities in 40 countries, she has discovered that bureaucracy and a lack of funding make it hard to pursue innovation even outside of a crisis zone. “We end up creating an environment that allows us to keep our nose down in our work,” Risinger said of some of the challenges of driving change in the international development sector. “On a project where you’re trying to get deliverables done and metrics collected, it is hard to pull your head up from that meaningful work and say, ‘We are going to take a full day next week and brainstorm.’ In development, we have the space to pull our heads up and unpack an insight we got from a project, but if we’re not intentional about doing that, it won’t happen.” Having an innovation team on board is not enough for an organization to accelerate its impact, Risinger, Pact’s first innovation director, added. A change in company culture is necessary. Meeting with Devex in Washington, D.C., where Pact is headquartered, for an interview for the Meet the Innovation Leads series, she explained how the organization has adjusted its strategy to make sure staff have the time and funds to innovate, and the space and permission to experiment. “There was a hypothesis that we could hire a dedicated innovation person to source new ideas from across the organization and get foundation grants to fund them as part of an effort to diversify our portfolio,” Risinger told Devex. Yet when she joined Pact, she found that many in-country staff who billed per project were asking to bill for innovation separately — viewing it as discrete work that would require the commitment of extra hours. This was one of the reasons she determined that before Pact could seek out unrestricted funding for these ideas, the organization had to build “intentional spaces for experimentation.” “‘Permissionless innovation’ ... that is, a fully empowered, enabling environment where every staff member not only has the resources to pursue their new ideas, but staff break out of the mental constraints of their technical area or job description, and embody a universal exploratory mindset.” --— Michelle Risinger, innovation director at Pact Risinger added that through these phases, Pact championed innovation. “Over the course of five years, we’ve brought various pivots to senior leadership and said, ‘This isn’t working,’” and been supported in those decisions — critical to her group’s successes, she said. When Risinger joined Pact, her role fell under the Pact Institute. But after two years, she was placed in the office of global strategy, and she and her team — by then built out to six innovation strategists, human-centered design experts, and social entrepreneurs — now fall under Pact Inc. The innovation groups now also work closely with sister teams including Pact Ventures — which it supports by sourcing potential investment ideas — and Corporate Engagement — which it collaborates with on nontraditional partnerships, recently including work with three corporations to apply human-centered design, or HCD, to problems they face. Risinger describes the Pact innovation strategy as three-fold. One is internal: Building enabling environments for innovation and experimentation at the country-office level. Another is external: Building partnerships with nontraditional partners to develop solutions together. The third is focused on the end user: Using participatory techniques such as HCD to include customers in the process. Pact used HCD, for example, as it prepared a proposal for funding work in Colombia. One of the proposal objectives was a strong focus on livelihood opportunities for women, but during the HCD process, it became clear that the communities felt far too much vulnerability after the conflict with the FARC — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — and believed that income generation might result in the FARC returning to the community in search of the profits. To combat this, Pact wrote a proposal focusing less on microenterprise opportunities, which might garner more attention, and instead on ways to offer opportunities connected to existing infrastructure. Initially, Pact rolled out country office innovation workshops — one-day programs that draw on private sector approaches, including HCD, to source solutions for product, service or platform innovations from end users. Building on the success of the country office innovation workshops, Pact has launched a Global Innovation Competition, where country offices can submit their ideas and get funding from Pact, as well as Ignite, an incubator that offers six months of support from the innovation team and $20,000 in seed funding to test ideas. One of the Pact teams currently being incubated is comprised of the Nigeria country office and Mines to Market teams. Pact is working to get miners to stop using mercury, a chemical toxic both for them and the environment, in order to extract gold. But miners lack the technology, knowledge, and incentive to make a change. After listening to Nigerian miners to understand their needs, the Pact team is working with gold traders to develop a gold-buying service center, where miners would bring mineral concentrate to be processed without the use of chemicals. “We need greater ‘permissionless innovation’ across Pact — that is, a fully empowered, enabling environment where every staff member not only has the resources to pursue their new ideas, but staff break out of the mental constraints of their technical area or job description, and embody a universal exploratory mindset — rooted in a desire to experiment and solve multidisciplinary problems,” Risinger said. She defines permissionless innovation as “having a mindset of humility, resilience, and eagerness to solve a problem, whether or not it falls into your silo of roles and responsibilities” and acknowledged that the ability to think this way can vary greatly depending on where a person or team falls within an organization. Risinger said she would like to see more dedicated space in Pact country offices for innovation work. Ideally, every country office would have an innovation officer, she said, but acknowledged this is an ambitious goal. Risinger said she would like all Pact employees to have more space to be creative, but noted that this is a challenge throughout the sector. “Within our sector, it’s the folks who are managing teams with discrete deliverables for the donor; who are embedded within the project, who often are not empowered to find the dedicated time to focus on innovation,” she said. “We see variations on a theme — the same app built up over and over again, or iterations of the same product or service, and it’s a shame — it’s wasted energy and effort on an already overstretched [development] community.” --— And when professionals are overly focused on the task at hand, they are often unable to find the time and space needed for transformative problem solving — and while longer time frames should ideally mean there is more flexibility to innovate, that does not always prove to be true. She hopes to see Pact address this by hiring more “multidisciplinary problem solvers that are not bound by some of the intangible constraints we sometimes put on ourselves as development professionals,” while also making a concerted effort to build capacity for entrepreneurial skills among its current staff. Another priority for Risinger, moving forward, is further collaboration with other innovation leaders in the sector. Despite sharing “very similar technical portfolios,” the development industry has been slower than others to embrace open innovation, Risinger added, saying this reluctance to share innovative ideas has to do in part with the competition for donor funding. “The result is, we see variations on a theme — the same app built up over and over again, or iterations of the same product or service, and it’s a shame — it’s wasted energy and effort on an already overstretched community,” she said. “Without strong knowledge dissemination we might have multiple nonprofits working on the same product and service and not collaborating, which is disappointing since the bottom line is not market share, but social impact.”