Prepared for delivery.

It is my pleasure to join you today at this conversation about innovation and frontier technologies.

First, let me thank our partners Denmark and Canada for their contributions and support to mainstreaming innovation into UNDP’s work.  The Government of Denmark is a mainstay to the UNDP Innovation Facility and I commend Canada for its leadership in putting development innovation on the agenda of the G7.

I should also acknowledge other thought leaders and partners here today, including Nesta, Lean Impact, the A2I Lab in Bangladesh, among others.

The challenges, complexities, and unanticipated challenges of our time leave us no choice but to invest in innovation and pursue both bold breakthroughs (‘moon shots’), as well as ‘puddle jumps’ or important incremental improvements in the way we pursue our shared commitment to leaving no one behind.  
    
Allow me to offer some reflections on achievements and lessons learned from the work of UNDP’s Innovation Facility since 2014, the beginning of our collaboration with Denmark.

•    The Facility initially pursued a bottom-up approach, deliberately investing in country-level experiments, learning and leveraging distributed knowledge and capacities across our network.  With a portfolio of over 140 experiments in 85 countries, our data show that partners from governments and the private sector chose to contribute additional resources in 60% of this portfolio – a first proxy for scale.  These initiatives also attracted 50% more private sector partnerships than the average UNDP project.  For every dollar invested, additional 2.1 dollars were mobilized at the country-level. These country-level innovation experiments have led to the emergence of new service lines for UNDP around alternative finance, data innovation, public policy labs, technology and behavioural design.  For example, with partners, we scaled an SMS-based reporting system to combat corruption in Papua New Guinea; an ingenious app for e-waste recycling in China; and a mobile payment mechanism for relief workers during and after the Ebola crisis. Through dedicated policy labs, UNDP supported ten governments to redesign public services with citizens, execute experimental policy design and inform and improve public planning through collective intelligence models.

•    Through these experiments we also learned that to innovate we must take calculate risks, take bolder chances and be ready to learn from what didn’t work.  

•    For example, we looked initiatives that were not taken up by partners beyond the initial incubation stages.  A common trait among these ‘failed innovations’ is that they are driven by a single intrapreneur, a single innovator. Learning from this, we adapted and improved how we source proposals to encourage submissions to emphasise the ventures behind a hypothesis: a team that consists of diverse skills sets to understand and navigate political economy dynamics.

•    With UNDP’s Strategic Plan 2018-2021, we entered a new phase, pursuing innovation beyond incrementalism.  This means, for example, that:

1.    We pursue improvement-oriented innovation.  Technology provides us with the opportunity to improve our reach to marginalized communities. It is essential to design our solutions that bridge economic and digital divides.  At UNDP we test and scale the use of context-fit technology to enhance our service offer. In Tunisia, UNDP worked with the National Statistic Office and UN Global Pulse on real-time insights (sentiment analysis) of public perception of corruption on social media. In India, we support real time tracking of vaccine stocks using Internet-of-Things technology, ensuring availability also in remote areas.

2.    We invest now in anticipatory innovation. We also need to enable and support our partners to explore solutions to better anticipate future risks, such as for example the impact of automation on the labour market.  In Serbia, for example, we are trialling applications of Universal Basic Income.  In addition, we ask how can we support governments with designing policies and services that strengthen future-proof capabilities? How can we support citizens, migrants and refugees with building an emancipatory relationship with their personal data and, at the same time, design accountability systems for data privacy and security?  Later this year, at the Istanbul Innovation Days event we will host a global R&D event on the future of governance to incubate experiments that help us and our partners designing new forms of government–citizen interfaces.

3.    We are supporting our partners to use innovation to accelerate SDG efforts: To accelerate government-led innovation efforts, we are increasingly supporting partners with formulating ambitious, measurable missions derived from the SDGs. Examples include a collaboration with the Government of Pakistan to address systemic challenges related to water security, deliberately involving multiple sectors and different organizations from within and outside the Government.  We will scale our work at the country-level to help government and other partners accelerate SDG achievement efforts through labs, country support platforms and other vehicles.

4.    We are investing in sustaining and cultivating innovation:  We are seeing emerging models for mainstreaming innovation and for advancing UNDP’s “innovation readiness”.  In Rwanda for example, UNDP just made it mandatory for all new projects to allocate a portion of their budget to invest in better understanding the problem at hand and identifying local solutions. We also embedded principles of innovation, especially adaptive management, in our corporate rulebook for programme and project management.
Innovation is neither a luxury requiring massive capital investment – nor is it something to be pursued in isolation.  Our partners request ever more sophisticated and integrated cutting-edge support, support which is firmly anchored in our comparative advantages and on our ability to bring partners together – including ‘unusual suspects’ - to rethink our development interventions, test and scale new ways of working.

It is my great pleasure to see some of our core partners coming together here today to help pave the way for the next phase of innovation in UNDP.