How to Scale Innovation – Podcast with the Global Development Lab’s Ann Mei Chang

Ann Mei Chang wants to “turn development upside down.” That’s how she describes the aim of the Global Development Lab, the arm of USAID that she runs. The Global Development Lab is tasked with finding new, innovative development solutions, testing them, rolling them out, and then trying to scale them.

In this week's podcast, she tells me that the process of uncovering new, workable ideas needs to be opened up more to “[tap] into the ingenuity of people from around the world, from all walks of life, whether they be local entrepreneurs, whether they be students, whether they be in the private sector or otherwise, because the best ideas often come from unexpected places, and often from bringing people with different perspectives together.” 

One way to do this is through Grand Challenges, where prizes are offered for innovative solutions to development problems. Many development agencies and organizations use this mechanism and USAID currently has seven challenges underway, from combating Zika to powering agriculture to improving reading skills in young children. Chang thinks of it as disrupting the status quo.

“Through our traditional processes of procuring development solutions—you know, put out an RFA or RFP—it’s usually only the usual suspects, that are large multinational organizations, that are able to compete for those. And so we're trying to lower that barrier to entry.”

But can Grand Challenges ever account for more than a tiny fraction of USAID’s procurement of development solutions?

“My hope is that over time this will become a standard practice, a standard way of doing business at USAID, where all of our programs will actually have an open innovation window as part of them, that brings in the fresh ideas and experiments with them so that we do apply the best solutions to the problem.”

Ann Mei Chang recently spoke at a CGD event on innovation for development. Watch it here.