How can we unlock and scale innovation through partnerships to achieve the SDGs?

SDGs
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Dan Berelowitz: CEO and Founder, International Centre for Social Franchising
Lisa Bonadonna: Head of GSK and Save the Children partnership, GSK
Carey Carpenter: Partnerships Manager, Living Goods
Jolene Dawson: Partnerships Services and Financial Inclusion Lead, Africa, Accenture Development Partnerships (ADP)
Moka Lantum: Managing Director, MicroClinic Technologies
Priya Madina: Government Affairs Director, Global Issues, GSK
Devyani Parameshwar: Principal Product Development Manager, M-PESA Vodafone
Chuck Slaughter: Founder, Living Goods
Kate Wolfenden: Programme Lead, WWF-X
Simon Wright: Head of Child Survival, Save the Children

Business innovations in technologies, products, services and business and financing models will be essential tools for the successful delivery of almost every Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), with the potential to transform the lives of the world’s poor through greater access to the essential drivers for human development including food, water, sanitation, healthcare, energy, education, and more.

Examples of promising innovations exist in almost every sphere of development but relatively few end up achieving a meaningful level of impact at scale. Instead many remain stuck at pilot stage because, amongst other things, they fail to attract the necessary finance, distribution networks and technical support to enable them to scale, sustainably.

While business plays a key role in leading innovation, whether by multinational corporations, national companies, small and medium firms or social enterprises, achieving and sustaining success at scale is also highly dependent on a supportive “innovation ecosystem” of partners including universities, foundations, development agencies, civil society organisations, incubators and accelerators, and governments.

As GSK and Save the Children launch their annual $1 million Healthcare Innovation Award, which supports innovations in healthcare that help to reduce child deaths in developing countries, this online discussion will explore the following questions:

  • What role will innovation play in achieving the SDGs? How can the SDGs help build and strengthen the ecosystem for innovation? What roles can different sectors best play?
  • What are some of the key drivers and barriers to innovations reaching scale sustainably and what are the essential enabling conditions required for success?
  • What principles and processes do partnerships between business and the development community need in place to help drive innovation? What are some good examples and what can we learn from them?

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Thank you for this initiative. I look forward to participating on Thursday. I have added a short video of our concept in case you would like some material to kick off on!!

We are an innovative poverty alleviation model that advocates 15 of the 17 SDG's. We use recycled shipping containers, cloud based software, linkages between formal and informal businesses to create last mile distribution hubs in under-served areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vkLmSgR858

88-SMARTPODINTROJuly2016Show.pdf (6.82 MB)
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Looking forward to kicking off shortly, as well. Thanks for sharing your video, Ketan.

Ketan patel said:

Thank you for this initiative. I look forward to participating on Thursday. I have added a short video of our concept in case you would like some material to kick off on!!

We are an innovative poverty alleviation model that advocates 15 of the 17 SDG's. We use recycled shipping containers, cloud based software, linkages between formal and informal businesses to create last mile distribution hubs in under-served areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vkLmSgR858

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Welcome to this online discussion! I'd like to start by asking our great panel to introduce themselves.

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Hi Everyone. I'm Carey Carpenter, Partnerships Manager for Living Goods. I currently oversee our partnership with CARE International in Zambia and Barclays-GSK, where we are collaborating to set up a social enterprise focused on availability of and access to affordable, high-quality healthcare products.

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Hi All,

Excited to be joining the call today!

Jolene Dawson, Partnership Services and Financial Inclusion Lead for Accenture Development Partnerships, based in Johannesburg, South Africa

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Hi Zahid and all,

Lovely to join this discussion.

I'm Kate and Co-lead on a programme called WWF-X along with Marcela Navarro.

We accelerate the adoption of sustainable innovations into the value chain, to bring about progress at the pace the planet needs it.

Looking forward to hearing everyone.

K

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Hi there Lisa Bonadonna joining, Global Head of the GSK-Save the Children Partnership, looking forward to a lively discussion.

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Thanks Zahid, I'm Dan Berelowitz, founder CEO of the International Centre for Social Franchising www.the-icsf.org. We help organisations scale. We've been working with GSK for a number of years and most recently are providing hands on support to the winners of the GSK/Save the Children Health Innovation Award winners to help them scale up.

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Hi, I'm Priya Madina and I work on Global Issues in GSK's Government Affairs Department, excited to hear everyone's views!

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Let's kick off with our first set of questions:

What role will innovation play in achieving the SDGs? How can the SDGs help build and strengthen the ecosystem for innovation? What roles can different sectors best play?

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Hi - I'm Simon Wright. Head of Health Policy at Save the Children. We have a five-year partnership with GSK, encompassing programming, advocacy and R&D. Very interested how we can look for long-term change out of these initiatives.

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The private sector recognizing innovation in new digital technologies and business models as a critical requirement to achieving the SDGs. In the Accenture UNGC CEO Study, 1,000 CEOs were surveyed and 97% reported that they believe sustainability is important to the future success of their business, with 75 percent of CEOs saying that digital technologies enable more sustainable business models.

The way business and development is currently run is focused on a linear models (Input –> Process –> Output). In the new digital world we find ourselves in, business models, funding models and indeed operating and delivery models are all being influenced to be more collaborative, with multiple inputs, processes and outputs all running simultaneously. These new circular and collaborative models increase the speed and complexity of the work being done, but also have major potential to increase impact. Innovation is the key to enabling the business and development communities to work together in a highly fluid environment to achieve the anticipated outcomes of the SDG’s by 2030.

Innovation comes in different forms, but the innovations that are remembered over time are those that are most disruptive. According to Clay Christensen and his work in the Harvard Business Review, “Disruptive Innovation” there are 3 type so of Innovation:

- Efficiency Innovation: that makes more product/service with less input, these innovations erode jobs, but frees up capital for growth

- Sustaining Innovations: that make good products better through new features, these innovations maintain both jobs and margins

- Market Creating Innovations: that create growth and jobs through creating new markets and new products/services

In my opinion, it is these Market Creating innovations that are most important to the delivery of the SDG’s and driving their intended outcomes as they are the most disruptive – these are the innovations that shift paradigms and bring about new ways of working and thinking. Efficiency and sustaining innovations will also contribute, but in smaller measure and more incrementally.



Zahid Torres-Rahman said:

Let's kick off with our first set of questions:

What role will innovation play in achieving the SDGs? How can the SDGs help build and strengthen the ecosystem for innovation? What roles can different sectors best play?

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Hi Everyone, I'm Devyani Parameshwar, Principal Manager for M-Pesa Commercial Strategy at Vodafone. Alongside our teams in Africa and Asia, I work on M-Pesa’s commercial strategy with a focus on the proposition for businesses, international organisations and financial service organisations.

Zahid Torres-Rahman said:

Welcome to this online discussion! I'd like to start by asking our great panel to introduce themselves.

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Innovation will play a myriad of roles in the SDGs. What’s interesting is how we capture those innovations that are working best now and scale them up using innovative approaches, business models and funding streams. If we don’t start scaling now we will miss the goals. The SDGs could provide the focus disparate actors need to come together and support innovations to scale around specific targets. For example, low cost private schooling is showing great promise across Africa as approach. So much more could be achieved in scaling up innovations like this if public, private and social sectors worked together to get the finances, policy and operations supportive of scale.



Zahid Torres-Rahman said:

Let's kick off with our first set of questions:

What role will innovation play in achieving the SDGs? How can the SDGs help build and strengthen the ecosystem for innovation? What roles can different sectors best play?

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Innovation is an essential ingredient for achieving the SDGs. The fact that deeply entrenched social issues have persisted beyond the MDG era is itself a sign that there is a need for new, fresh ideas that bring together the very best of the non-profit, for-profit, government, and social sectors. The more we can leverage skills and capabilities across sectors and find innovative ways to work together, the better equipped we will be to achieve the SDGs.

Zahid Torres-Rahman said:

Let's kick off with our first set of questions:

What role will innovation play in achieving the SDGs? How can the SDGs help build and strengthen the ecosystem for innovation? What roles can different sectors best play?

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I think what is really interesting about the innovation is that is an overused word, so knowing exactly what we mean by that is a challenge by itself.

Marcela and I deeply believe that many of the solutions to some of industries (and therefore the world) grandest challenges already exist today they are just not scaling at the rate and the pace that they need to.

So I would challenge that the role innovation could play in achieving the SDGs is not just creating the innovations but providing the enabling conditions to accelerate / commercialise them.



Zahid Torres-Rahman said:

Let's kick off with our first set of questions:

What role will innovation play in achieving the SDGs? How can the SDGs help build and strengthen the ecosystem for innovation? What roles can different sectors best play?

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Innovation has a central role to play in meeting the SDGs and we need to think more creatively and flexibly now we have a wide-ranging agenda covering such broad range of issues. New creative solutions and partnerships help unlock potential and deliver more – one size fits all solutions won’t work. We will need new tools and interventions if we are to meet the SDGs by 2030 and we need innovative ways of utilising existing interventions.

The SDGs give us a new framework to structure our innovation and work cross-sectorally to deliver on it and encourage us to make the connections and synergies across the Goals.

Each sector can bring different advantages to the process and we all must start thinking outside the box in terms of the way they operate – business as usual will not achieve the SDGs. Most will choose to focus on the Goals that can best be met through services provided by their area of expertise. GSK concentrates on Goal 3, relating to healthcare which is our area of expertise. In terms of achieving UHC, all sectors have a role to play – from a healthcare perspective we are focused on better access to healthcare but clearly education and nutritional needs are also important factors in leading to a healthier population.

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If we keep doing the same things then we will keep getting the same results. Improving on current practices will undoubtedly lead to incremental improvements but transformational change needed to acheive the SDGs can't happen without innovation.SDG 17 in particular underscores the importance of partnership, recognising that no single individual, organisation or sector has the answer, and indeed taken collectively, one can see that the SDGs themselves are not discrete challenges but are in fact all interconnected.

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The SDG’s need to be delivered through partnerships to achieve scale and systemic impact. The MDG’s were a concentrated group of objectives that could be delivered in isolation. The SDG’s however, require business, governments and development agents to work together to achieve them, and impact delivered on one focussed SDG will have knock-on effects across several other SDG’s. For example, work cannot be done on improving SDG 3 - good health and well-being, without also influencing SDG 1 - no poverty, SDG 2 - zero hunger, 6 - clean water and sanitation, SDG 8 - decent work and economic growth, SDG 12 – responsible consumption and production and others.

For me, the most critical SDG is SDG17 - Partnerships for the Goals – as this is the core enabler of ecosystem strengthening. When focussing on how business can leverage innovation to deliver the SDG’s the Accenture UNGC CEO study 2016 highlights that

- 90% of business feel a personal responsibility to ensure their business has a clear purpose and roles in society,

- 87% believe that the SDG’s provide an opportunity to rethink approaches,

- 78% already see opportunities to contribute to the SDG’s through their business, and

49% of the CEO’s believe that business is the most important actor in delivering the SDG’s – a clear shift from previous thinking where general sentiment was governments must drive the MDG’s.