1. It is important to get one of the international experts to speak about open and bottom-up innovation. One of them has a draft paper on this which I have shared with the e-gov team in Istanbul. This will hopefully balance a bit the”NESTA” approach and which in my view does not take into account Southern-based innovatation.
2. Mention should also be made of the fact that innovation is now taking place in the South and that UNDP should look more closely to this phenomenon. And here we can introduce the planned International Network of Social Innovators for Human Development that we launched in Kenya a couple of weeks ago.. The core objective of the network is to match supply (innovators in developing countries) and demand (our COs and development partners) to address key development challenges and help bring new solutions to existing development gaps with a focus on scalability and replicability. We do not need any more pilots. We need to scale up existing programmes. And this also clearly link with both MAF and governance programming.
3. We should also mention FOSS as a model for open innovation in terms of the way communities are/get organized. Northern based innovation models is usually focused on single individuals whereas FOSS et.al. is based on communities collaborating towards common goals and objectives. This approach also applies to our international network.
4. In terms of the actual generation of new ideas, etc. we should push for having the discussion grounded on existing and real issues that COs are facing today and not on wild ideas that some might have. Also note that the group is quite uneven with some doing quite innovative stuff bit on the other hand a few not even on board on ICTs. This also needs to be balanced.
5. A revised concept note on the sessions, which was originally drafted by BCPR consultants, is here (Day3-Innovation-sessions-2013-05-19-rz) and includes my own track changes and comments.
Hope this helps.
Cheers, Raúl
