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Technological devices like handheld PDAs are banned in some embassies...

INNOVATION

Improving Foreign Assistance With User-Driven Innovation

While international assistance programs have alleviated poverty for hundreds of millions of people in the past decade, delivery systems are often obsolete and fail to take advantage of new technologies. Karin von Hippel, coordinator of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., proposes ways to leverage Internet technology to improve living standards around the world.

Her focus is on what she calls “user-driven innovation.” In a new paper written for the CSIS Commission on Smart Power, von Hippel says that government and transnational organizations should look outside the traditional foreign aid community for solutions:

“The systematic application by the U.S. government of new research approaches and techniques from management sciences, industry, and Silicon Valley could help solve many development challenges and accelerate change in fundamental ways. Foreign assistance programs could become more effective by emulating and adopting these practices, particularly the focus on ‘user-driven innovation,’” von Hippel writes.

“A user innovation is one in which the developer expects to benefit by the innovation. These users typically innovate to solve their own needs at private expense, and have a high incentive to solve their problems. They ‘freely reveal’ their innovations because, by doing so, they gain an enhanced reputation, their innovation is likely to be improved by others (also for free), and there are network effect benefits. What these users want today, the market will want in the future.”

...but these basic tools of communication are available even in the most economically-challenged regions.

The United Nations, the World Bank, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are aware of user-driven practices and techniques. But as large, old-fashioned, vertical bureaucracies, they are poorly structured to integrate user-driven concepts into their programming. They “seldom factor them into policy and programming at the macro level,” von Hippel notes. The result is wasteful: “Consequently, separate funding streams and programs—traditional and nontraditional—are currently operating in parallel, and rarely in a complementary manner.

“Donors and implementing partners instead need to learn how to identify what the most advanced users are already doing, and then build on and leverage these solutions, through advanced techniques already in use in the private sector,” she says. Many elements of the U.S. government—particularly in the military and the intelligence community—already have embraced user-driven tools.

The humanitarian relief and development communities, though, have not. “If they could utilize those same tools to improve their connectivity and agility within and across government, as well as with international and local actors,” the CSIS scholar says, “they could make a significant impact on aid effectiveness.”

Bureaucratic and security considerations discourage that from happening. “Not only are restrictions placed on the physical movement of U.S. government officials in a number of developing states, but they also have limited access to some high technology tools at work, such as the handheld PDAs, or cell phones in some embassies.”

Meanwhile, as cell phones and communications become ever more affordable, the users, including peasants in remote areas, are embracing technologies from traditional audio and text communication to telephonic purchases and money transfers.

Von Hippel urges the big international aid institutions to focus less on “conceiving, developing and implementing projects,” and more on “facilitating, coaching, deregulating and supporting” what the users—including many of the world’s urban and rural poor—are already doing on their own.

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From the November/December 2007 issue of Serviam.