Over the past five years, UNDP Accelerator Lab Viet Nam has been on a learning journey. We’ve experimenting with bold ideas, listening deeply to communities, and navigating the messiness of change alongside partners from government, academia, startups, and civil society. This is not just a story of success. It’s also about failure, barriers , and the invisible changes that shape how our systems evolve as we take part in it.

To mark the Lab’s 5-year milestone (2019–2024), we invited a team of independent evaluators to conduct a comprehensive life-cycle review. Their mandate was to understand not only what we did, but what we learned, what changed, and how it happened—across multiple levels of the system change.

The review offers three core contributions:

• Distilled learning from five years of practice: From exploring circular and night economy models in Da Nang, to co-designing data experiments with public agencies, and mapping innovation ecosystems, the Lab surfaced insights that challenged business-as-usual development models.

• Candid reflection on what worked—and what didn’t: Real-world case studies, like our collaboration with promoting innovation in national agencies (NIC and NATEC),  to our early ethnographic work on informal waste workers, shed light on the conditions where change takes root.

• Evidence for decision-makers and practitioners: Whether you’re a policymaker, donor, or local change maker, this review aims to offer grounded evidence for those wanting to design and implement innovation unit, adopt experimentation portfolios, or embed systems-thinking into institutional work.

We’re sharing this review in the spirit of open dialogue as we believe social innovation, when practiced authentically, is less about arriving at perfect solutions and more about building collective capability to adapt, learn, and change. Feel free to reach out to us at nguyen.tuan.luong@undp.org if you like to learn or share.