Innovation is at the heart of many successful development efforts – from cash transfers and digital payment systems to new vaccines. It is key to making development activities more efficient and effective. The OECD equips Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members and partners with evidence, tools and connections to enhance their strategic innovation efforts.
When development programmes and innovations stop at the pilot stage, they fail to have lasting national, regional or global impacts. Development providers must therefore have a vision of scale, backed by long-term funding.
Agencies need to incorporate that vision into their criteria for selecting, designing, supervising, monitoring and evaluating programmes and innovations. To support them, the OECD is developing Scaling Principles for the sector.
'Mission-oriented' approaches to policy making are co-ordinated packages of policy and regulatory measures to mobilise science, technology and innovation, aimed at meeting a specific societal challenge in a defined timeframe.
As governments in low- and middle-income countries seeking to accelerate their transformation, including net zero transitions, express interest, the OECD works with them, and their development co-operation partners to generate evidence and help emulate successful approaches.
To better support locally led innovation, bilateral development agencies should reassess their role: their specific comparative advantage is often in enabling solutions rather than providing them.
Shifting practices requires an open discussion of the trade-offs between the national interest of providers in expanding markets for their innovators, and the need to invest in the capabilities, ecosystems and markets of their partners.
Most members of the DAC invest in Challenge Funds and Challenge Prizes. These allocate financing and often other forms of support to organisations or individual innovators, based on a competitive process. Both mechanisms aim at testing and scaling novel solutions to development challenges.
DAC members invested approximately USD 1.514 billion in or in relation to Innovation Challenge Funds and Prizes between 2012 and 2022.
