Incentivizing Innovation in #Development

I’ve been getting into Twitter in the last couple of weeks. I know I’m only five years later than everyone else, but I’m loving the new insights and the quirkiness of it all. Two things were “trending” on my Twitter timeline recently that, seemingly unrelated, made me reflect on the incentives shaping donor effectiveness.

The Global Development Lab
First, USAID launched its Global Development Lab (#GlobalDevLab). This happened with much fanfare, including an event with Secretary Clinton (and a gazillion tweets!). There’s good coverage in Nature, the Guardian, Time, and DEVEX.

A HT (that’s ‘hat tip’ for Twitter newbies like me) to @RajShah for establishing this. Arguably, it represents the culmination of his vision and priorities over the last three years. It encapsulates his focus on science, evidence and innovation. It embodies his focus on “open source development,” encouraging USAID to engage with a much broader range of development actors, including universities, students, civil society organizations, the private sector, and other stakeholders across the world. The lab’s stated purpose is “to discover, test, and scale breakthrough development innovations to solve development challenges faster and cheaper in support of US foreign policy and development goals and to accelerate the transformation of USAID as the world’s premier development agency.”

I admire the vision, I buy into the rationale about how development is changing, and I like some of the specific innovation, such as the new fellowship program, which will help the flow of thinking between USAID and partner organizations. But does the lab represent the radical step change that some have suggested? Or is it more about consolidating the recent direction of travel?

We all know that innovation and transformational change require experimentation, risk taking and failure. In the face of a hostile media environment and strong Congressional oversight, USAID’s appetite for risk is low. I haven’t seen anything that suggests the lab will alter this. Dr Shah has compared the lab to the Department of Defense’s DARPA (the experimental lab which was behind a stealth jet and many other new technologies), but is this a fair comparison? The DARPA is an independent entity reporting directly to senior management, with direct control of a budget of somewhere in the region of $2.8 billion. USAID’s lab is in effect a bureau in the organization, broadly using standard USAID systems and procedures, and securing its funding from Congress. USAID will establish ‘new authorities’ to give the lab greater freedom, for example, who it hires and how it works with business. It will also ring fence some funding for “white space” thinking, although the funding for this will be quite limited. But radical approaches to give the lab more independence have not been followed. The downside of this is that the drive to innovate risks being weakened by the caution and conservatism that is inherent in government. My own slow conversion to Twitter suggests that us bureaucrats don’t make the best innovators!

But at this point, Dr Shah deserves another HT, for USAID’s Global Development Innovation Venture (G-DIV), also supported by DFID, the Omidyar Network and others. G-DIV has many of the characteristics of the lab. There is a focus on transformation through technology, and on working with new partners. There is a strong focus on evidence and evaluation. But crucially GDIV will sit outside of DFID and USAID as a separate entity.

How DFID Learns
The second trend I saw last week was the publication of a new report by DFID’s watchdog, The UK’s Independent Commission on Aid Impact (@ICAI_UK), on how DFID learns. The review was thorough and quite critical at times. “DFID has allocated at least £1.2 billion for research, evaluation and personnel development (2011-15),” it read. “It generates considerable volumes of information, much of which, such as funded research, is publicly available. DFID itself is less good at using it and building on experience so as to turn learning into action.”

The core findings resonated with me. We can always up our game on this, although in our defense, the report does describe serious efforts already underway, for example through our investments in specialist professional knowledge. I especially agreed that we fail to openly discuss and learn from failure.

After reading the report I returned to Twitter to see what others thought. This led me to Duncan Green’s excellent blog suggesting the report failed to focus enough on the underlying incentives which explain why DFID is not as good at learning as it should be. Yup, I agree. The second tweet was a critical Guardian newspaper report – “DFID accused of failing to admit shortcomings, ineffective use of £1.2bn research budget and poor engagement with beneficiaries.” Yes, media scrutiny is one of those unhelpful incentives that Duncan Green is referring to. What’s the motivation to discuss and learn from failure when critics are so eager to seize on this?

Both of these examples demonstrate the profound pressures on DFID, USAID and other development agencies, not to fail. And there’s a real irony that some of the institutions which are most critical of our effectiveness, Congress and the media, by their actions provide powerful incentives that sometimes deter us from innovating and being transformational. As development agencies we need to find ways to take risks, make mistakes, learn from them and improve. I guess Samuel Beckett had it right…

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Is there a hashtag for that?

Follow Andrew on Twitter @acpreston