Today, maybe more than ever, human beings are feeling the urge to merge into a collective force that can allow us not only to face the challenges brought on by the pandemic, but also the ones that have been pending for a while now: The Sustainable Development Goals.

This is why UNDP recruited unusual talent with a clear mission to join its great community: To build and feed the largest learning network on development challenges in the 21^st century. Interconnected and dynamic, the 116 Accelerator Labs are active in 92 countries and offer disruptive ways to sense, think, act and exchange knowledge; they are becoming bridges that facilitate the cocreation of solutions between citizens, UNDP specialists, strategic partners and decision makers.

In Peru, the start of the Accelerator Lab’s operations coincided with one of the largest demonstrations the country has ever seen. In November 2020, while Peruvian youth took to the streets to express society’s most pressing needs and demand change, the Lab heard their call and decided to begin the transformation from the inside out. In this first blog post we will share our foundational process and the learnings that we found relevant for all organizations looking to activate their own innovation culture as well as an open space for discussion where it can engage with its own context.

First step. Know thyself.

Our first day of work, despite being quarantined, was explosive. With so many challenges ahead of us, so many ideas and resources, it was difficult to make the first decisions about the road we would travel. However, the Lab’s team shared a certainty: Every challenge requires a cohesive and flexible team, capable of adapting and surfing through uncertainty (which is essential to our daily activities). How do you design and build that capability?

Meeting our Country Office’s team and immersing ourselves in their scientific, technical, political, social, human and innovative world was our first step. To make the most of this opportunity we developed a methodological guide based on internal and external in-depth interviews, which allowed us to leverage our newcomers’ perspective. From the neutral standpoint belonging to someone who has just joined the team, we found a significant record of innovative initiatives and likeminded colleagues. We were able to quickly empathize with them and constructively identify, little by little, opportunities for improvement: The Labs’ very own internal sphere of action.

After systematizing our findings, we discovered 5 priority needs or capabilities that needed to be strengthened within our great new team. In this gap we had found our reason for being here. After all, the umbilical cord that connects the Accelerator Labs to the “mothership” is kept alive by constant exchange and strengthening our evolving capabilities.

 Second step. Design our value proposition.

The Accelerator Labs’ most attractive yet challenging feature are its multiple networks and layers of connection with different actors and their ecosystems. The relationship with our Country Office is just as important as our relationship with our global HQ and other Labs around the world. These last ones are each comprised by a talented trio: An experimenter, an explorer and a solutions mapper, which bring a multidisciplinary and specific background to the table. This is why each country’s Lab has space to create and imprint its own local flavor on its interactions with the larger network, of course always following the global guidelines and methodologies, and in this way support its growing diversity.

With the objective of minimizing the culture clash between the Lab and the Country Office, we defined the Lab’s value proposition through strategic workshops. We are here to deliver learning experiences in two ways: Through shared development of our frontier challenges, or through on-demand experiences designed to address specific challenges in short periods of time.

●       Frontier challenges

Our frontier challenges are medium and long-term experiences which are triggered by a specific problem and developed through the process of creating experiments and a solutions portfolio around it. We fall in love with a topic every 100 days, we embrace it quickly and curiously by constantly dialoguing with the country, its citizens, and experts, to co-create and test potential solutions in accordance with our global model.

●       On-demand learning experiences

The Accelerator Labs also look to kickstart changes through specific interventions that we offer to our team, counterparts and partners. We design short learning experiences that aim to develop and strengthen internal capabilities by solving concrete challenges: We incorporate weekly immersion, creation and idea validation sessions using our network’s agile methodologies and experimental methods designed in-house.

Third step. Bring our innovation culture to life.

We’re humans and we’re here to grow and share. We began this fast and curious acceleration journey convinced of the transformative power of teamwork and our community. We face our country’s systemic challenges seriously and audaciously, by designing a learning O.A.S.I.S that will hopefully become part of our organization’s culture (and that of all the change agents we interact with). Peru’s context and its youth requires it, the stage is set, and here we go!

On behalf of the Accelerator Labs, we are thankful to our founding investors: The Federal Republic of Germany and the Qatar Fund for Development. We are aware that this is a global experimental journey, where we must navigate the most urgent challenges and find collective solutions that don’t leave anyone behind.
 

IF YOU ARE A CHANGEMAKER within your group of friends or family, your neighborhood, your university, your community, your business, your town, your government, an international cooperation agency, or at home…we want to meet you. Email us at acclab.pe@undp.org.