Innovation is definitely becoming a fixture in global development. Every year, thousands of ideas are thrown into grand challenges competitions or innovation labs, hoping to be noticed, win funding and then scale up.
If your idea gets picked, you’re lucky to get the funding — and sometimes technical support — to move ahead of others, who now feel they are up against the wall and won’t be able to progress unless they win next year’s challenge, or stumble upon a willing investor. But the truth is that winning that award doesn’t guarantee your idea succeeds or makes an impact as you hope it would. If you ask Brenton Caffin, who has years of experience in the innovation space and now works as director of innovation skills at London-based charity NESTA, all these grand assumptions are hogwash.
“One of the things that I say quite often when people [say they] need money for innovation is sometimes what you can do is repurpose and think about the resources that you actually have,” he told Devex at the sidelines of the recent Data Innovation for Policymaking conference organized by the U.N. Development Program in Bali, Indonesia. “Sometimes all it takes is people’s time … to try something different. There are lots of examples where stuff has been tried out using little or no money, and then once it’s proven, [that’s the time] they can find money for them to scale up.”
About the author
Jenny Lei Ravelo@JennyLeiRavelo
Jenny Lei Ravelo is a Devex Senior Reporter based in Manila. She covers global health, with a particular focus on the World Health Organization, and other development and humanitarian aid trends in Asia Pacific. Prior to Devex, she wrote for ABS-CBN, one of the largest broadcasting networks in the Philippines, and was a copy editor for various international scientific journals. She received her journalism degree from the University of Santo Tomas.
