Max Baiden is an experienced innovator, program manager and strategist with over 10 years of experience in the humanitarian and international development sector. He has worked across humanitarian innovation, policy, innovation, entrepreneurship, as well as small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) development, collaborative ecosystems and innovative finance.
Max is a program manager within Results for Development’s Innovation practice. He is the deputy program lead for the Frontier Technologies (FT) Hub where he focuses on scaling innovations that have been funded through the Hub and supporting continuous learning and improvement. Max will also manage the emerging tech and collaborative scaling spokes of the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA). Max provides operational and strategic direction ensuring that we are providing an ecosystems approach to tackling some of the world’s most challenging complex social problems.
In his first role at DAI, Max help to run the Climate, Environment, Infrastructure and Livelihoods Call Down Service and the follow-on Expert Advisory Call Down Service (EACDS), supporting DFID (now FCDO) advisors to design and run their small-scale innovation projects. At Save the Children, Max helped to incubate four start-ups; the Humanitarian Leadership Academy, ELRHA, the Start Network and the Collaborative Cash Delivery Network, co-leading the latter and setting up the franchise in Ethiopia. He co-led the design and implementation of an INGO Leadership Survey, in collaboration with Nuffield College, which identified the biggest challenges facing INGO leaders by 2030. Max became the Head of Innovation and Strategy at Kumwe Hub, supporting early-stage impact-driven start-ups to receive catalytic financing and support. He was also the strategic advisor to a Ukrainian entrepreneurship ecosystem collaboration, and the testing of a social currency application that connects professionals to start-ups. Max was the Project Director at DAI for an SME Development program in Nepal, helping to support and grow 3000 SMEs in Koshi Province and a Global Biodiversity Facility, offering grants to research projects working in the nexus between Climate, Livelihoods and Biodiversity.
Max holds a bachelor of honors degree from the University of East Anglia in international development. He also holds a Chartered Management Institute level 3 qualification in people leadership.
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