LocationsThe story of how we used Research and Development Raves to activate distributed R&D
From "Best" to "Next" Practices in Global Problem Solving:
January 2, 2025
We find the patterns across what people are already learning, distill the insights, make sense of it, and let that inform how UNDP creates value.
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People closest to the problem are closest to the solution. How do we learn from and with these "experts"? What do signals of ethnography, experimentation and ecosystem work across multiple countries tell us about what we need to learn to make development sustainable?
These are some of the questions on our minds. Those of you who follow the UNDP Accelerator Labs know that we’ve been trying to prototype what might be a new kind of Research and Development (R&D).
Instead of one R&D unit coming up with new corporate products, we curate the work of Lab teams embedded into the UN’s operations in over a hundred countries. Headquarters doesn’t direct the Labs. Instead, we’re trying to tap into the emergence that happens from Argentina to Zimbabwe, from Samoa to North Macedonia, from Syria to South Sudan and so forth… when innovation teams choose the problems, methods and partners they engage with. Our distributed R&D prototype supports UNDP’s work on signal spotting and adaptive portfolio management as part of UNDP’s broader futuresmart approach.
Once you start a global practice of decentralized experimentation, how do you land that back in a large organization that is already committed to strategic goals and responding to hundreds of dynamic contexts? Our thinking was that it went something like this: Find the patterns across what people are already learning, distill the insights, make sense of it, and let that inform how the organization creates value. Organizational learning from the bottom up. A knowledge management story that was sorted out in the 1990’s, right? Practice tells a messier story.
90’s Redux: Enter R&D Rave!
With thanks to our founding investors and the Cabinet Office of the government of Japan, this past year we field-tested "R&D Raves:" processes that try to make sense of disparate innovation signals on sustainable development problems and build coalitions and collective learning agendas around them. This is part of our prototype for a new kind of R&D: one that is open, collective, and that learns from the people it aims to serve.
(Sidenote on calling them raves: at first we did this to use play as a way to introduce some humility, but it took on other meanings - retro 90’s knowledge management, dancing in the “field” and even “raving” about what we learned from each other’s experiments despite the different contexts in which they emerge. The playful name of the process seemed to help us focus us on exploration in the face of emergence, but with a coalition vibe. It is yet to be seen if this playfulness helps or hinders us as we try to land what we learned back into the sustainable development mothership!)
The R&D Raves helped us build on patterns and signals we were seeing across Africa, Latin America, Asia and beyond:
- The growth of digital finance in the wake of the pandemic but an unclear impact on poverty
- Combining grassroots knowledge and AI to combat swarm pests to protect small grains
- Collective traction creating value from food and plastic waste
Our bottom-up global R&D prototype looks like this: once we see the experiments and exploratory work across the global Network converging on the problem space, we take a deeper look. We map the signals of experiential learning and bring in the relevant domain (thematic) experts. This shapes our R&D agenda. In the raves, we:
- map out what is already there - models, know-how, people, other assets;
- think through what we need to further test, to contextualize, to try at a different scale, to recombine different combinations of those innovations?
- and develop a theory of change to hold it all together.
We’re hoping that this kind of bottom up/distributed process will help activate the social ecosystem, build movements and weave a collective learning agenda across people working on the same problem, even if their endeavors are in different countries and/or uncoordinated by a larger strategy.
From patterns to questions, held together by a theory of change
If we want to solve new problems in new ways, questions are our currency. So once we had a look at the way global innovators were approaching problem-solving, we put the focus on what is emerging as a theory of change that holds together a forward-looking set of R&D/learning questions.
What a ban on Power Points looks like thanks to Bas Leurs: we’re using floor size and handmade diagrams that focus our discussions and enable co-creation of collective learning frameworks. (Food Systems R&D Rave, September 2024, Harare)
Here’s where we landed:
Digital Financial Inclusion: Together with colleagues from UNDP’s Sustainable Finance Hub and UNCDF, the Mastercard Foundation and others, our emerging learning agenda focuses on the whether and under what conditions digital finance puts more money in the pockets of women and men in countries of the Global Majority.
We’re driving R&D to answer related questions such as:
- What can the world learn from the first generation digital (mobile) wallets in East Africa that have helped people to transact easily and affordably?
- What does data empowerment for digital financial services look like?
- How can alternative data scoring increase access to credit among the unbanked?
Food Systems: Within the much larger agenda of agrifood systems transformation, we’re working with UNDP’s Food Agriculture Commodity Systems team, FAO, the Qatar Fund for Development and others to build an R&D agenda focused on supporting market niches for the poor with the potential to activate systems change.
We are building R&D coalitions to address these and other questions:
- What financial tools work for farmers?
- What works to better position women and youth in the value chain?
- How can heirloom foods and orphan crops drive new markets and farmers’ resilience?
Circular Economies: Taking cues from UNDP’s Chemical Waste Hub and leading innovation in East Asia and Pacific, our R&D agenda is emerging from waste experiments and systems design efforts in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. As prototypes, these disparate efforts have been working with informal waste pickers and businesses to incentivize plastic recycling, find alternatives for packaging materials and turn trash into income or even health insurance. We’ve done some work with Ikea and Ashoka on this to understand the connection between informal and circular businesses.
Pulling it all together and looking ahead, we’re trying to use small experiments in waste management as entry points into circular systems approaches. That seems to entail something we’re currently calling “weaving a collective” as UNDP Philippines has done together with the European Union and other partners in their Green Economy portfolio.
Globally, we will be driving experimentation to answer questions like:
- How can we de-risk waste innovation which is often ahead of regulation?
- What kind of evidence informs government waste management decisions?
- How can digital technology drive circularity in informal businesses?
From signals & experiments to new value?
As we fine-tune these learning agendas across UNDP and with partners, we are building out experimental and exploratory activities to answer these questions. A question is only as good as its answer after all!
For the Rave after-party, our goal is to engage with the thematic experts within UNDP and beyond who have been driving change in these areas well before we started to see these signals. One thing I’m struggling with is finding an R&D agenda for large complex systems issues, i.e. those wicked problems that feel out of reach given powerful short term and/or profit incentives, multiple actors and not least, political headwinds. With these types of wicked problems defining an R&D agenda can be challenging. There is a lot that needs to get done - from policy change to market incentives to finding real ways to work towards equity and sustainability. What is the edge and what is the core?
Finding the R&D cream in the sustainable development cake
We’re finding that a good filter for an R&D agenda item is: can progress towards an answer to this question happen in several months due to prototypes or exploratory work? That helps make a learning question small enough to work towards and interesting enough to attract collaborators. On the other hand, we’re learning not to get lost in the singular solutions myth. People need to see real momentum, but keep an eye towards more transformative change. A government colleague from Pasig City where they have built an Innovation Circular Economy Hub to support waste innovators put it well when he said something like, “your system design work helped us hold the space to keep a large vision while we lined up the material inputs to build the physical space that signals a transformation.” I took this to mean that weaving a collective of actors doing their small bit can hold the space for larger transformation.
The post-rave light of day
In the post rave light of day, we’ll try to draw connections between and among what we’re learning across the themes emerging in this bottom-up R&D: food systems, circular economies and digital finance. There appears to be a common thread when it comes to peer-to-peer, cooperative economic models that create value from waste and connect value via informal networks. I am looking forward to working with UNDP’s Strategic Innovation Team on the alternative economic model front as this seems to be an area of growing demand, also a topic on deck at Istanbul Innovation Days, so check that out.
As we embark on these R&D learning agendas, let us know if you want to see the full plans or how we went about it - we’re keen to find partners in this space and get it right! And it’s not out of the question to hold more R&D raves… possibly in information integrity, cities and mobility and sustainable tourism as these are global experimentation signals that might need some raving.
Many thanks to Alex Oprunenco and Bas Leurs for their wisdom and brutal feedback that helped build the R&D raves and improved this blog. Reach out to Tayo Akinyemi, Eduardo Gustale, Mirko Elbelshaeuser and Alberto Cottica if you want to give input or learn more about the coalitions, experiments and learning questions to which we are seeking answers.