Explainer Video Script

Societies and technologies are changing at a pace faster than we have ever witnessed. Traditional methods of doing business are no longer enough to address challenges and crises we face today. Access to readily available experiences, no matter the location, is critical. Existing development solutions are starving for agile and adaptive approaches to make them available and usable in other places. The United Nations Development Programme is dedicated to building new experiences and encouraging experimentation to explore new development options.

Those first steps are laid out in the 2014-17 strategic plan which has been designed to make the organization more current and responsive to today’s challenges by focusing on three substantive areas of work: how to adopt sustainable development pathways; how to build and/or strengthen inclusive and effective democratic governance; and how to build resilience.

But as an important part of UNDP, you know this. You’re working hard to ensure these efforts come to full fruition.

However, what you may not know is that we’re focused on fostering open innovation for development impact. By addressing complex problems in a new way we can achieve organizational agility through new partner development approaches, including “co-creation”, innovation camps, hackathons, and data-dives in partnership with NGOs, social entrepreneurs, and government units across the world.

We are taking this initiative further by experimenting with new ideas ourselves. We are focused on better programmes with more sustainable results through more inclusive and collaborative approaches to the development process – from inception to impact. We are using innovative approaches to monitoring and evaluation, like crowdsourcing, micro-narratives and real-time reporting, that help us be more responsive in our programming while helping our national partners adapt to change, manage risk, and achieve sustainable results.

For example, look at how UNDP works with non-traditional groups to solve problems. One such solution is The My World/The World We Want program where we teamed up with youth groups, private sector bodies and NGO partners all over the world to launch MY World, a global survey that allowed citizens to choose their priorities for a better world.

Or think about the many social innovation labs where programmes are designed for private, public, and social-sector organizations to build technical solutions to social challenges.

We are even experimenting with the idea of prize challenges to drive innovation and find solutions for development challenges.

UNDP understands that experiences are now widely distributed. The organization cannot rely entirely on their own research, but should acquire inventions or intellectual property from other organizations or individuals when it advances the business model. Solutions to problems and crises won’t come from one direction, country, or program. We need to look forward, innovate on multiple levels, and think outside of the traditional boxes.

So – what will you bring to the table? How can you join in UNDP’s efforts? How will you experiment with innovation?

Have an idea? Good. Reach out to us at www.undp.org.