[Thomas Feeny, a program director at Results for Development (R4D), discusses the International Development Innovation Alliance, which R4D manages, and the release of a series of reports.]
The International Development Innovation Alliance, which describes itself as an informal platform for knowledge exchange around development innovation, recently made insights from working groups more widely available in a series of reports.
“When we set ourselves up with the Sustainable Development Goals, there was a strong recognition among all development actors that innovation would be a key channel through which to achieve them,” said Thomas Feeny, program director at Results for Development, a nonprofit organization that manages the IDIA.
There are a growing number of innovation labs across the development sector. Many of them are focused on implementing the SDGs. But what can these organizations do to harness their transformative ideas and reach their intended goals?
The heads of innovation from major international development organizations — including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Bank — came together to form the IDIA in 2015. They hoped that innovation would accelerate the path toward achieving the SDGs, compared to the failure to reach the Millennium Development Goals they replaced.
