Innovation is critical to delivering sustained, scalable solutions to the world’s complex challenges, but far more can be done to identify promising innovations and support them to achieve transformative impact at scale.
The Challenge
The world is facing unprecedented, complex and interconnected challenges that cannot be addressed through a ‘business as usual’ approach. By 2030, the global population is projected to reach 8.5 billion people, roughly 85% of whom will live in low- and middle-income countries. Achieving health and prosperity for all while sustaining the planet’s natural resources will require bold new solutions and innovations that disrupt our current systems, and change our societies for the better.
Yet, in today’s landscape of global aid retreat and geopolitical instability, the development community is fragmented, under-resourced and struggling to translate innovation into impact at scale. With major reforms to the development finance architecture underway and global progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) lagging far behind our aspirations, identifying and supporting innovative solutions to achieve scale in a more efficient and coordinated manner is an urgent priority in the fight for a better world.
The Opportunity
Governments, the private sector, civil society, academia, development institutions and donors need to collaborate smarter, faster and more efficiently than ever before – crossing traditional boundaries – to identify and scale proven solutions, and tap the energy of innovation needed to disrupt the world’s complex challenges.
For more than a decade, Results for Development ( R4D) has been providing strategic advice to leading development agencies and funders on how to mainstream innovation in their efforts to advance the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda through the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA).
Founded in 2015, this unique collaboration platform brings together a diverse, globally connected ecosystem of actors – including multilateral and bilateral agencies, philanthropic foundations, government leaders, innovation networks, social innovators and entrepreneurs – who are bound together by a shared mission to advance innovation for sustainable development.
Now in its second strategic phase, IDIA has scaled from a close network of institutional leaders to a global ecosystem of communities and collaboration labs, who are actively cross-pollinating their resources and expertise to drive development impact at scale in more than 40 countries worldwide.
R4D’s Work
R4D co-founded and co-designed IDIA in 2015, leveraging initial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to explore the potential of a knowledge exchange platform for leading development agencies and funders to share learnings from their innovation strategies and programming. It has managed IDIA’s Secretariat function ever since, facilitating the everyday governance of its finances and operations, and supporting the Alliance to advance its mission by:
- Providing advisory support to the member agencies of the IDIA Executive Committee (IEC) on the design, curation and iteration of the IDIA Ecosystem portfolio
- Administering tailored, strategic and technical advice to IDIA member agencies and funders to enhance their innovation strategies and programming
- Building networks, brokering strategic partnerships and curating communities of actors to facilitate locally-driven development impact, including the Million Lives Collective and IDIA Global Innovation Advisor network
- Designing and delivering global and ecosystem capacity strengthening initiatives, such as the IDIA Adaptive Leadership Program on Managing Innovation for Impact, and Leveraging AI to Enhance Development
- Outcomes iteration in 2025
- Convening ecosystem strengthening and network building events, such as the 2025 IDIA Global Summit, and Kenya and Vietnam Innovation Ecosystem Strengthening Convenings 2018-19
Our Progress
As the host of IDIA’s Secretariat, R4D has played a pivotal role in strengthening global capacity, collaboration and support for innovation in development since the Alliance’s inception in 2015. This has included:
- Catalyzing a variety of working groups and strategic taskforces to address critical knowledge gaps, and co-create shared frameworks and tools to enhance the efficacy of development innovation practice in key areas, including scaling, impact, gender, systems innovation, frontier technologies, and ecosystem strengthening.
- Working with the G7 Organizing Committee to develop the The Whistler Principles to Accelerate Innovation for Development Impact in 2017, providing the world’s seven most advanced economies with a shared innovation framework to drive change in their own organizations and enable new partnerships to support pathbreaking solutions that challenge traditional approaches.
- Building a new generation of innovation leaders through the IDIA Adaptive Leadership Program on Managing Innovation for Impact, which has so far created a community of over 160 alumni who are leading the application of IDIA principles, tools and frameworks in more than 30 countries around the world.
- Spearheading the shift towards innovation ecosystem investment, working with a variety of actors in Africa, Asia and Latin America to co-create a groundbreaking model to support the efficient production and scale-up of innovations through an ecosystem approach.
- Partnering with governments in East Africa to pioneer an adaptable, locally-driven model for scaling health innovations through the public sector, which is now being implemented by 16 county governments in Kenya, as well as the national Ministries of Health in Ethiopia and Tanzania.
- Building and strengthening targeted networks that connect global and local innovation actors — including the Million Lives Collective, Global Innovation Advisor Network and IDIA Government Innovation Fellows cohort — to enable more equitable and efficient collaboration.
Building on its first decade of experimentation and learning, IDIA launched its new collaboration model in late 2025, convening actors from across its ecosystem at a Global Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, to shape its collective impact priorities for its next strategic phase. R4D will continue hosting IDIA Secretariat into the Alliance’s second decade, supporting its members to align and mobilize their collective resources to drive development impact at scale in three interconnected areas, reflecting some of the most urgent challenges of our time: One Health, Urban Futures and Regenerative Livelihoods.
Read more on the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA) website.
