Innovative projects spearheaded by United Nations (UN) country offices are remodeling the institution and expanding its role. Digital initiatives and initiatives that scaled through headquarters were shown to have the strongest impact, changing ways of working, embedding new skills, and restructuring teams across the UN. The research conducted by Prof. Tina Ambos and Katherine Tatarinov at the Geneva School of Economics and Management (GSEM) highlights that fostering even single innovative projects could lead to fundamental transformations in the UN through mechanisms of imprinting.

The UN is experimenting with innovation – what is the managerial impact of these initiatives?

The UN has often been highlighted as being slow, bureaucratic and recent developments and public pressure have pushed the UN agencies to foster more innovation. To understand this new phenomenon, we conducted over 40 interviews with people working on innovative projects inside the UN with an eye to understanding the processes behind these initiatives and their true impact. The two-year study follows eight innovative pilot projects managed by five different UN organizations to find out if innovative initiatives have a wider effect on entrepreneurial behavior within the organization. This study is important for any organization looking to enact transformation or foster a culture of innovation within hierarchical and traditional systems.

By taking a specific look at the scaling mechanisms and technology of the initiatives, the paper finds that there are two main ways in which initiatives scaled and this impacted the way they mitigate bureaucratic challenges. We found that initiatives that scaled-up centrally could lead to an expansion of an organization’s purpose. In one case study, a refugee cash transfer initiative using blockchain, widened the responsible UN body’s role from ‘ending poverty and hunger’ to that more closely resembling a fintech company or development bank. By providing a platform for aid delivery, the organization is now helping its partners bypass unstable third-parties and save on transaction costs. Our findings show that the seed from one good idea can grow throughout a complex organization like the UN, changing it from the inside, and creating new space for enterprising ideas to flourish.

Innovation champions and innovation units help initiatives overcome organizations tensions and scale

Innovations often start life in UN country offices, where staff need to respond quickly to unfolding crises. To circumvent slow central procedures, in-country innovators may decide not to involve the headquarters. Good ideas then spread from country to country, such as an anonymous SMS polling tool designed to gauge opinions on taboo topics in remote communities. The idea grew organically, as other country offices could see the value of access to data on taboo topics. Such country-level innovations can achieve scale and have been shown to change the organization’s culture when digital technology is involved.

Innovation champions at the country level are willing to employ workarounds to avoid head office bureaucracy, because they are motivated to solve an urgent problem – rather than by internal rewards or recognition. They are therefore able to access funds and forge partnerships which may have been disregarded by the large, centralized machinery of the UN, but which nevertheless align with broader organizational values.

Innovation units were found to be key in helping the UN scale initiatives by driving forward dynamic solutions. Such units nurture initiatives through boot camps, cross-sectoral connections, helping teams overcome internal barriers, and broadcasting new learnings to the entire organization. The UN also involves local people to ensure sustainability and maximize social impact. End-users, such as refugees, are often active members of development teams, helping ensure that projects ‘do no harm.’

Fostering innovation in frontier technology is enabling the UN to expand their value proposition

In terms of technology, the more technologically advanced initiatives were able to have greater transformative powers. New digital initiatives led to the organization upgrading its institutional knowledge and creating new teams to manage digital projects, which were found to have the biggest impact on how the UN operates overall. Other technical skills have also been internalized, such as on hydroponic farming in one organization or connected learning in another. After learning in one context, the UN was able to test different technologies in its sites of operation according to local needs without depending on external experts.

The key actionable outcomes of the paper are that innovative initiatives have different mechanisms of overcoming bureaucratic tensions but that headquarters should activate to scale these transformative initiatives globally. Instead of seeing these initiatives as one-hit-wonders organizations can start to view them as laying the foundations for learnings to come. Through imprinting key learnings, these initiatives were able to not only positively affect the customer (beneficiary) of these organizations but also create new ways of working and expand the value proposition of the organization.

If you are interested to learn more about how innovation can impact an organization or to learn more about initiatives scale and grow in the UN, please take a look at our full study here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joms.12738

Keywords: innovation, responsible innovation, intrapreneurship, International Organizations