Lessons from designing and implementing innovation challenges: How to mitigate risks and what’s next?

28 April 2021

14:00 – 15:00 CEST

Innovation challenges differ from organization to organization based on their innovation goals, their requirements and barriers to achieve those goals, their strengths, and their tolerance for risk and failure.

Understanding one’s organization is a key success factor for innovation. However, since innovation means “doing things differently, and doing different things,” challenges such as bottlenecks, the relative weaknesses and strengths of testing, or the development and scaling up of ideas are not always immediately evident. Over the last few years, innovation challenges have become increasingly popular as an effective mechanism to scout for ideas internally and externally, select them, fund them, and support them to scale up.

This Innovation Talk shares experiences from three Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) – UN Innovation Network, WFP Innovation Accelerator, and the private sector, as represented by VentureWell – on what they have learned from designing and implementing innovation challenges.