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Essential how-to guidance for government product managers and digital teams.

Organising for Systems Innovation at Scale Our team at Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation have been experimenting with and evolving a Challenge-led Innovation Approach (based on Mission-oriented approaches developed by Mariana Mazzucato at UCL IIPP and others internationally). We are using this approach to guide the way we work internally and engage with our systems innovation partners. We’ve facilitated intensive Re:Treats, worked with government bodies, businesses and civic...

Many readers recognise and understand that complex is about as simple as it gets for major policy and management. This guide is for those unwilling in the Anthropocene to shrink back into the older platitudes about ‘keep it simple’ and ‘not to worry, we’ll scale up the analysis later on’. This guide offers key concepts, methods, counternarratives, and analogies that recast major policy and management issues in ways that do not deny their complexity but help render them more tractable for action.

Nearly all challenges in international development tend to be complex because they depend on constantly evolving human behaviour, systems, and contexts, involving multiple actors, entities, and processes. As a result, both the discovery and scaling of innovations to address challenges in development often involve changes in system behaviour or even system-level transformation. This is rarely a linear process over time and can result in unexpected outcomes. Existing evaluation techniques...

Outside of community-led design projects, most participatory design processes initiated by a company or organisation maintain or even strengthen power imbalances between the design organisation and the community on whose purported behalf they are designing, further increasing the absencing experience. Radical participatory design (RPD) is a radically relational answer to the coloniality inherent in participatory design where the community members’ disappointment is greater due to the greater...

This chapter reviews key literature and concepts relating to the co-creation of digital public services. For this task, it is firstly important to consider what kind of digital public services may be suitable for co-creation. In order to do so, the first section of this chapter defines what a digital public service is (e.g. with respect to different types of service providers, different types of services and service delivery) and considers what kind of digital public services allow for...

This open access book attends to the co-creation of digital public services for ageing societies. Increasingly public services are provided in digital form; their uptake however remains well below expectations. In particular, amongst older adults the need for public services is high, while at the same time the uptake of digital services is lower than the population average. One of the reasons is that many digital public services (or e-services) do not respond well to the life worlds, use...

How can we design and build digital technologies to support people in poor and low resource environments to achieve their objectives? And how can we do this inclusively and ethically, while considering the complexity of their living and working environments? This is the central question in my research. One of the grand challenges of international development cooperation is to make digital technologies available for social and economic development of poor regions of the world. To achieve...

La pandemia de la Covid-19 ha brotado súbitamente en un momento de transición para las instituciones y organizaciones sociales de medio mundo. Cuando aún no se había superado la crisis de confianza de la última década entre los ciudadanos y los gobiernos, en un momento de gran impulso de las iniciativas de gobierno abierto, planes de innovación y transformación digital, para hacer más democráticas y eficientes las administraciones a través de programas políticos encaminados a configurar un...

A pandemia da Covid-19 surgiu de súbito num momento de transição para as instituições e organizações sociais de meio mundo. Antes ainda de se ter ultrapassado a crise de confiança da última década entre os cidadãos e os governos, num momento de grande impulso das iniciativas de governo aberto e de planos de inovação e transformação digital para tornar mais democráticas e eficientes as administrações através de programas políticos encaminhados para configurar um novo contrato social, verde e...

This working paper compares six of the most prominent adaptive approaches to emerge over the past two decades. Three come from the world of innovation, largely in the private sector (agile, lean startup and human-centred design), and three from the global development sector (thinking and working politically, forms of adaptive management and problem-driven iterative adaptation). While all of these approaches are valuable when used in the right context, practitioners may be perplexed by the...

Thoughts on the future of creative problem-solving from across the industry

Scaling Impact introduces a new and practical approach to scaling the positive impacts of research and innovation. Inspired by leading scientific and entrepreneurial innovators from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, this book presents a synthesis of unrivalled diversity and grounded ingenuity. The result is a different perspective on how to achieve impact that matters, and an important challenge to the predominant more-is-better paradigm of scaling. For...

The Scale Up Sourcebook is informed and inspired by the September 2018 conference, Innovations in Agriculture: Scaling Up to Reach Millions, organized by Purdue University, in partnership with the African Development Bank. The Sourcebook consolidates, extends, and disseminates some of the scaling insights presented at the Purdue conference. It is intended as an easy-to-use guidebook targeted to a broad and diverse audience of stakeholders associated with scaling agricultural technologies and...

In recent years, critical research literature in ICT4D has grown. It is widely accepted that theory is to inform practice. However, the inverse directionality, practice informs theory, is much less present in ICT4D, including in critical research. In this paper, we discuss ways how ICT4D research and theory may be better informed by practice—in terms of (i) recognizing praxis-oriented research paradigms and integrating their results, (ii) development of foundational theories, (iii) critical...

This rapid review summarises the evidence on how to scale up inclusive approaches to complex social change. It looks at how to design scalable inclusive change interventions, as well as how to plan and manage the scale-up process. Focusing on interventions with the aim of reaching the most marginalised and transform social norms, it covers programmes aiming to deliver inclusive outcomes for women and girls (with a particular focus on preventing violence against women and girls) and persons...

The Humanitarian Innovation Guide is a growing online resource to help individuals and organisations define humanitarian problems and successfully develop innovative solutions. ABOUT THE GUIDE The humanitarian sector is investing in exciting innovations, but it is not yet producing a steady pipeline of well-designed solutions that effectively address problems, evidence their impact, and have the potential to be scaled. As stated in a recent independent evaluation of the Humanitarian...

Both human-centered and systems-thinking methods fit within an effective design approach, and can work in conjunction to address social challenges.