By Jan Piotrowski,
The development community's narrow focus on
top-down innovation is obscuring the importance of other areas - such as
user-led innovation - as useful inputs to the innovation process, says a
leader of the UN Development Programme's innovation team.
The community must move away from its 'one-size-fits-all' approach to
innovation and create a varied tool kit to adapt programmes to complex
individual situations, says Giulio Quaggiotto, who leads the UN
Development Programme (UNDP) Knowledge and Innovation team at the Europe
and Central Asia office.
His team has just launched a website and a blog dedicated to
collecting examples of early adopters on user-driven innovation and
opening the discussion about the applicability of the approach to
development work.
The website lists examples, including an innovative plough from Kenya, mobile banking and patient innovation.
Even though research shows that there are many people in need of
specific innovations who are at the same time able to create solutions
that would satisfy their needs, there are few examples of the
development projects that are tapping into user-led innovations,
according to the team.
Quaggiotto believes top-down innovation models dominate development thinking at the expense of grassroots methods.
He is collating evidence of user-led innovation from research
literature and has uncovered successes in health, and in information and
communications technologies.
One recent study showed that at least half of all innovations in
mobile financial services in emerging markets came from end users.
Another study investigating innovations in healthcare highlighted
patients who developed their own prostheses - replacements for missing
body parts - and heart valves.
Quaggiotto says he needs more examples of user-led innovation before the UNDP can apply the lessons learnt to its own projects.
Accepting bottom-up innovation models must be part of a more general
move towards a more-varied approach in development, he says.
Many organisations and government departments champion one particular
approach to innovation, such as crowdsourcing or innovation labs, and
do not consider the other options available, he says.
When tackling complex development challenges, it pays to have a broad
range of tools and methods, he adds. To provide development actors with
a comprehensive set of options, Quaggiotto believes more attention
needs to be paid to grassroots innovation.
"In the private sector, people are more aware that there is no one
path [of innovation], but in the development sector we often tend to
latch on to a single vision," he tells SciDev.Net.
Adrian Smith, a senior research fellow at the STEPS Centre for
interdisciplinary research and policy engagement at Sussex University,
United Kingdom, agrees that certain ideas tend to dominate the field of
innovation for development.
However, this tends to be within decision-making circles, he says.
"On the policy side, there do tend to be fashions and a crowding around the 'new' form of innovation," he tells SciDev.Net.
But Smith believes the fundamental problem is the attention on industry as the main driver of innovation.
Conventional ideas and policies for innovation and development tend
to focus on promoting technological innovation in firms, in
collaboration with research institutes, he says.
In contrast, grassroots innovators operate in different
circumstances, so conventional measures for innovation, such as training
scientists or filing patents, make little sense, he adds.
But awareness of a more-nuanced innovation landscape with more of an impetus on grassroots innovation is increasing, says Smith.
