First of all thank you for this article, hearing this attitude from someone at the World Bank is very exciting. I think while the innovations you suggest are certainly necessary another issue the World Bank needs to take on to truly facilitate innovation is the issue of failure. There needs to be an open dialogue on the experiments that failed, why they failed and how they could be improved upon. Leveraging an open source, information-sharing platform like the ODTA would be a great way to facilitate this conversation. Another way to facilitate experimentation is accounting for this possibility in making loans or giving out donor funds. Programs should be adapatable and should be able to say ‘We thought this was going to work, it didn’t work. Back to the drawing board.’ without backlash from funding organization. I would be very interested to hear your opinion on ways in which that could be done.
COMMENTS
BY Bart Doorneweert
ON November 18, 2014 01:36 PM
Great to see this thinking finally coming through at a personal level. Next challenge is to get your funding structured according to such principles. Something I wrote about some 2 years ago here http://valuechaingeneration.com/2012/06/04/private-sector-development-projects-and-the-pivot/
BY Alexandra Alden
ON November 26, 2014 12:32 PM
First of all thank you for this article, hearing this attitude from someone at the World Bank is very exciting. I think while the innovations you suggest are certainly necessary another issue the World Bank needs to take on to truly facilitate innovation is the issue of failure. There needs to be an open dialogue on the experiments that failed, why they failed and how they could be improved upon. Leveraging an open source, information-sharing platform like the ODTA would be a great way to facilitate this conversation. Another way to facilitate experimentation is accounting for this possibility in making loans or giving out donor funds. Programs should be adapatable and should be able to say ‘We thought this was going to work, it didn’t work. Back to the drawing board.’ without backlash from funding organization. I would be very interested to hear your opinion on ways in which that could be done.