Scaling innovations to accelerate progress towards development and climate goals
By Parnika Jhunjhunwala, Junior Innovation Specialist at OECD Innovation for Development Facility, Benjamin Kumpf, Head of OECD Innovation for Development Facility, and Johannes F. Linn, Co-founder Scaling Up Community of Practice and Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution
Limiting global warming to 1.5°C necessitates radical, quick and large-scale transformations, as echoed throughout the IPCC’s 1.5°C Special Report. The same is true for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. To achieve these transformations, we need disruptive, context-fitting, technological and social innovation, and to create incentives to ensure that once proven effective, innovations are scaled-up. Unfortunately, too many promising innovations fall into the ‘pilot project trap’ and fail to have an impact at the national, regional and global scales.
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Innovation promotes the global economy’s sustained growth, and innovation in developing countries can be achieved through two main means: independent research and development (R&D) or technology adoption. It is generally believed that developing countries can achieve development at a lower cost and faster by adopting technology. Even though enterprises are subject to certain restrictions in their technology adoption, such as mergers and acquisitions (M&As) that may be rejected due to national security factors, is it still relevant to depend on the adoption of technology for innovation to achieve continuous development?
Billions of people at the world’s economic ‘’margins’’ are experiencing a moment of changing connectivity. In Manila, Manchester, Mogadishu, the banlieues of Marseille and everywhere in between, the world is becoming digital, digitised and digitally mediated at an astonishing pace. Most of the world’s wealthy have long been digitally connected, but the world’s poor and economically marginal have not been enrolled in digital networks until relatively recently. In only five years (2012–2017), over one billion people became new Internet users (ITU 2016). In 2017, Internet users became a majority of the world’s population. The networking of humanity is thus no longer confined to a few economically prosperous parts of the world. For the first time in history, we are creating a truly global and accessible communication network.