OPEN INNOVATION TACKLING THE PANDEMIC

Kambria @ www.kambria.io as part of Open innovation is increasingly essential for an effective response to and recovery from the COVID‑19 pandemic in low and middle-income settings that are the target of official development assistance (ODA) investments. Innovation in development and humanitarian responses to the pandemic has tended to focus on incremental improvements to repurpose existing aid approaches on the one hand, and on new biomedical and pharmaceutical product developments on the other. Most of these efforts have originated in and been led by actors in high-income countries. There are relatively few positive examples of innovations taking a more transformational, inclusive, and empowering approach, challenging existing norms and practices, and rethinking the role of actors in low and middle-income countries. Such innovation efforts can and should become more mainstream across the sector, both as a means of addressing the urgent needs generated by COVID-19, but also as a way of re-orienting the development and humanitarian sector for the future challenges that undoubtedly await.

• Moving beyond ‘single point’ product based interventions to look at processes and paradigms
• Seeking to balance ‘innovation for development’ portfolios with more emphasis on forward-looking anticipatory innovation and bottom-up adaptive innovation
• Investing in more strategic and focused collaboration, especially with local and national actors
• Ensuring and sustaining a focus on the poorest and leaving no one behind

Challenges faced by development and humanitarian actors as a result of COVID-19

• How to navigate the technical and operational uncertainties of effective responses given financial and operational limits imposed by lockdown-related policies that have left even institutions in high-resource settings struggling.
• How to cope with reductions in the mobility, availability, and capacity of staff and partners, from head office level through to the operational front lines.
• How to ensure that the immediate response to COVID-19 also takes into account longer-term development ambitions and pre-existing challenges, including the Sustainable Development Goals, climate change, and fragility.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents what is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges ever faced by international development and humanitarian organizations. There have already been major consequences for the world’s poor and vulnerable, in terms of the direct impacts of the public health crisis on health and mortality, and indirect impacts on social, economic, and political systems. The bilateral and multilateral aid system, long seen as over-stretched, is facing fundamental questions about how best to contribute to the pandemic response and the post-pandemic world that is starting to emerge. Moreover, the aid system is being rocked by the dramatic economic impacts of the pandemic. Key players are working out how best to navigate the reductions in gross national income in donor countries around the world, and the implications for ODA budgets. Innovation has attracted a lot of attention in the perfect storm scenario of the ongoing pandemic as a means of dealing with these challenges and a host of other related issues. In high- and low-resource settings alike, and from global through to local levels, effective responses have emphasized trial-and-error experimental approaches and the use of evidence and science to generate novel ideas.

Examples include:

• Rapidly developing and deploying tests, personal protective equipment (PPE), clinical procedures, pharmaceutical treatments, and the ultimate holy grail of reliable and safe vaccines to protect against COVID-19.
• Developing effective surveillance techniques and technologies for tracking and tracing cases.
• Identifying ways of reducing transmission, including appropriate measures for reducing social contact, shielding the most vulnerable, and quarantining suspected and known cases.
• Developing appropriate policies and interventions for dealing with social and economic effects, as well as ensuring a secure and sustainable longer-term recovery.

the performance on the innovation for development agenda has been promising but mixed. A number of initiatives and programs have exceeded expectations, and are the source of genuine transformative and large-scale development gains. These include:

• Lowering the cost of and access to vaccines and medicines in the poorest countries.
• Using mobile money and microfinance to drive financial inclusion and small business development.
• Using community-based approaches to tackle malnutrition and sanitation.
• Using cash transfers to enhance food security.
• Using insurance and other adaptation measures to enhance resilience to disasters and climate change.

These successful efforts, though diverse, share common threads. They all involve careful navigation of:

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(1) technical issues relating to the innovation itself;

(2) business planning issues around how to test, implement and scale up the innovation in question; and

(3) wider institutional and political issues that can often work to maintain the status quo and inhibit novel solutions. Even when the innovation is relatively simple, such as transferring cash to poor communities, success has involved taking a systemic approach.

Other innovations for development efforts have been less effective in generating tangible impacts, and are ambiguous and uncertain with regard to future gains. A few have even had a negative or detrimental effect on development efforts. For the innovation for development movement as a whole, the peer learning exercise identified several overarching challenges. First, in many areas of development and humanitarian work, it is not the technologies for progress that are lacking, but the enabling institutional environment, related levels of political energy, and the will to encourage and foster adoption. Despite this, the largest part of the innovation for development effort has focused on generating more products and tools.

Secondly, despite the vital importance of engaging and involving local actors in developing countries — including governments, the private sector, civil society, and poor and vulnerable communities — for innovation processes to be successful, most efforts remain dominated by ‘international’ experts.

Thirdly, international development organizations — DAC members included — have tended to see innovation as a silo, or something that can be ‘grafted on’ to existing programs and projects, rather than as a core strategic imperative.

Finally, the very nature of innovation involves taking risks, making bets, and hedging between successes and failures. It is inherently difficult — if not impossible — to predict upfront which set of ideas, teams, organizations, and networks will prove successful. And even in relatively well-financed settings, innovation investments need to deal with the reality of high failure rates. In the complex and ambiguous world of development and humanitarian work, trial and error become even more important, as a means of enabling learning and improvement. The risk appetite for innovation needs to be balanced with effective systems for making decisions about when and how to give an idea the best chance of success; and how to judge when to drop an idea that is not working. However, accountability concerns have led innovation for development work to focus less on active and intelligent risk management of this kind and more on risk minimization.

SOME INNOVATIONS ADOPTED IN ORDER TO TACKLE THE COVID19 PANDEMIC

• Mission-driven innovation — The most obvious example here is the development of a COVID-19 vaccine and related arrangements for fair and widespread distribution. Also in this category are the much-publicized efforts to develop ventilators for managing acute COVID-19 cases. While the bulk of these innovation efforts is not focused on developing countries, there have been notable exceptions. For example, a unique public-private partnership to develop a USD 1 COVID-19 test has brought together the United Kingdom government, a global diagnostics firm, and the Institut Pasteur de Dakar (IPD) in Senegal, as well as a number of collaborating academic institutions around the world that have undertaken evaluation and validation at numerous stages of development (Institut Pasteur, 2020[5]). The work has involved adapting an existing IPD innovative diagnostic (for dengue fever) for use with COVID-19. Other large-scale innovations at the policy level include furlough and insurance schemes that have been put in place to support businesses and workers during widespread lockdown measures.
• Enhancement-oriented improvements — Many of the efforts in COVID-19 infection control and management fit into this area. For instance, the approach being taken around the world to tracking, tracing, quarantining, and shielding vulnerable groups builds on lessons learned from previous epidemic responses, with adjustments made for the specific epidemiology of COVID-19. Some of these have seen novel processes, which upended the traditional development model of global North-South transfer noted above. The track and trace model used in the US State of Massachusetts (Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 2020[6]) has learned extensively from work in Africa, led by the international non-governmental organization PATH. Much of the technological innovation has also focused on incremental innovations. For example, there are numerous examples of medical devices — from ventilators to scanners — that have been simplified and made cheaper for both developed and developing countries. In some cases this has been through repurposing existing solutions or by rethinking existing problems: consider how waste plastic is being recycled and used to produce face visors in Dar-es-Salaam in the United Republic of Tanzania. There are also widespread examples of digital innovations that have helped address a wide range of problems, from supporting household-level social protection mechanisms to modernizing business finance facilities.
• Adaptive innovations — This refers to original, simple, locally generated ideas that enable results that would not otherwise be attainable. These grassroots innovations have emerged in environments where scarcity of resources compels human ingenuity. Some of these highly localized efforts are based on specific aspects of COVID-19 responses, such as low-cost and frugal production of effective PPE (e.g. the M-19 Initiative in India) (Maker’s Asylum, 2020[7]). In other settings, entire approaches to the response have emerged from local understanding and practices. For example, in Kerala, India, the response was led by the state-level government, whereas in the city of Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, community-led innovations have underpinned efforts to support the extremely vulnerable survivors of the 1984 gas poisoning disaster.
• Anticipatory efforts — In the COVID-19 context, governments around the world are trying to rethink how the post-pandemic world should look. These include efforts focusing on a comprehensive ‘global reset’ of the international economic system that created such dramatic vulnerabilities to the pandemic, and on ensuring a ‘green recovery’. Much of this work is focused on policy-level innovations so that the global economy is re-established on a more sustainable footing, as well as the related organizational and technological innovations that might support these broader changes in societal and economic life. For example, in Vietnam, the government took a multi-pronged approach to the pandemic that addressed the immediate health impacts, the secondary economic impacts, but also placed an emphasis on social solidarity and civic participation, through both new and adapted technologies and processes, all at relatively low cost.

More information regarding the Open innovation in tackling the pandemic can be accessed through Kambria eduKation

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