Launch Plan: The Inside Journey of how the UNDP Started 60 Accelerator Labs Globally

Welcome to our ongoing series, Launch Plan, featuring deep dives into the founding stories and journeys behind game-changing organizations, projects, and enterprises. We’re continuing the series today with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s 60 Accelerator Labs.

When grappling with immense world challenges, one thing holds true: there is no one solution to any problem, and there’s a lot that we don’t yet know.   

“There is no best practice for dealing with violent extremism. There is no best practice for dealing with disease that travels faster because of droughts. These things are just uncharted territory.” – Gina Lucarelli, team leader of the Accelerator Lab network.

For the last 54 years, the UNDP has worked to accelerate development in 170 countries and territories, helping them develop their policies, institutional capabilities, leadership, and resilience in order to tackle poverty, inequalities, and exclusion. Last year alone, the organization supported elections around the world on a weekly basis, provided 3 million displaced people with housing and energy, cut 256 million tonnes of carbon emissions, and provided over 6 million people with HIV testing and counselling. 

Despite its ongoing successes, the UNDP is also facing new and complex global challenges at a scale never seen before, from climate change and extremism to growing urbanization. We have yet to see the full consequences of these challenges — so how does a response-based organization even begin to react?

If you’re the UNDP, you take the lead by launching 60 Accelerator Labs in countries around the world in order to test and scale cutting-edge solutions to these fast-growing challenges as they happen. Announced in July 2019, the UNDP Accelerator Labs mesh local, grassroots innovations with real-time data and experimentation, in an attempt to identify and scale solutions.

Labs, characterized typically as some combination of physical spaces, innovation methods, data, and experimental project portfolios, are not a new model, and there is a proliferation of them. But how does one implement a lab in a large and established organization? This is a challenge that many in the world of social impact are perhaps familiar with.

To learn how the labs came to life, I sat down with the aforementioned Gina Lucarelli, and Milica Begovic, innovation specialist at the UNDP.

The idea that sparked worldwide innovation

In 2017, Achim Steiner became the UNDP’s newest Administrator. During his first year visiting country offices, Steiner noticed there were a number of places setting up innovation labs, or integrating new development strategies into their daily work.

However, these initiatives were fragmented within the organization, and despite the exciting changes, the efforts hadn’t amounted to changing how the UNDP fundamentally worked. 

“Governments are facing issues that they’ve never faced before, and our focus on innovation [even at that time] was already allowing us to turn that position of ‘not knowing’ into a strength.” Begovic said. “After all, if the UNDP is able to identify these emerging trends, make sense of them, and turn them into policy responses, we become far more relevant to our clients.”

Noticing the enthusiasm for the labs, and some weak signals as to how the labs would create impact, Steiner made the decision to invest in them. He launched 60 Accelerator Labs in countries around the world. 

“[His] hope was that the labs would create a tipping point in the international development system,” Begovic said, “both in the way that the UNDP operates and in the results that we achieve. Some made a point that 60 labs seemed a bit ambitious, and perhaps we should start small. But Achim’s response was: ‘no. Our ambition and our action needs to match the scale of the issues that we face, so we’re going to do this all at once.’”

On the name ‘Accelerator Labs’

While we’ve (arguably) reached the peak of knowledge, we don’t know how to deal with  climate change, extremism or massive urbanization. “We’ve never faced these issues before,” Lucarelli said, “so the priority moves from taking action to actually figuring out a solution in the first place. Because the world is so complex, we just need to learn.”

“We decided to call the program Accelerator Labs because we’re intent on accelerating learning about what works and what doesn’t,” Begovic reflected. “We’re not incorporating technologies or accelerating startups, but really accelerating learning about what works and what doesn’t.” 

Lucarelli added, “We’re not looking for one solution — the panacea, the unicorn, the silver bullet — that’s going to solve complex issues that cut across different ministries, sectors, and disciplines and which require political will and collective action in order to solve.”

Designing the Accelerator Labs

When designing the Accelerator Labs, the UNDP first looked at their existing labs. Begovic highlighted the five key trends that emerged.

1. The labs’ purposes got divorced from their original intent, creating yet another silo, or a delivery unit that was executing on the agenda but not necessarily questioning the agenda itself.
2. Many of the labs weren’t connected to the executive team in country offices. Those that were would become subject to questioning depending on new leadership and politics.
3. Labs were created to prove that a new solution worked, as opposed to addressing big-picture moonshots (with few exceptions such as Youth Co:Lab, which intentionally went for policy moonshots).
4. The people working in different sectors didn’t come together. There was a very clear distinction between the “social innovation mafia” and the rest of the delivery space.
5. The labs weren’t connected into a network where they could really benefit from learning, sharing, and accelerating what they were each learning. 

“These learnings really fed into the initial design of the Accelerator Labs,” Begovic said. “Basing our design on Bas Leurs’ innovation methods research for Nesta, we came up with three key functions of the labs that we thought would help us accelerate learning.” 

They are as follows:

1. Exploring: Quickly identifying incoming issues and what their potential implications may be on sustainable development. As a result, there is now a Chief of Exploration in each lab.
2. Solution mapping: Instead of reflecting on ‘lessons learned’ as a way to create solutions, look to how people are coping with issues like poverty and natural disasters. Observe how they turn their coping strategies into solutions, and then provide pathways to scale those solutions. This means the lab is scaling what is working today, not what worked yesterday. The Head of Solutions Mapping works towards this.
3. Portfolios of experiments: With a dynamic portfolio of experiments, the labs can examine a complex problem, to “keep picking at it and seeing how and where it moves”, and to know which solutions to invest in. Each lab has someone who structures a portfolio of experiments. 

“We had quite a bit of internal pushback with these functions, because on the procedural side, they aren’t something that we know as an organization.” Begovic said. “How do you even make a case for why a Head of Solutions Mapping or a Head of Exploration is in the room with a substantive expert in a certain field?”

Begovic said that this anxiety continues within the UNDP. “It’s on us to prove how a Head of Exploration can improve what a substantive expert does daily. We’ve also structured the labs so that they each report to the corresponding director of their country office. While the labs themselves have capabilities that are very horizontal, they work to support the actual office, which comes with substantive expertise. 

The labs are the engine that helps others, which goes back to that initial idea that social innovation and substantive experts shouldn’t be apart.”

Making the internal case for the Accelerator Labs

“After designing the labs, we actually had to implement them across the UNDP,” Lucarelli said. “The reception to the labs, of course, really depended on the audience. Some are going to be really excited about the idea of building the world’s largest, fastest learning network on development challenges. Internally, there are parts of the house that really get excited about the cutting-edge, and exploring how to create action in this messed-up world we’re in.

That approach doesn’t necessarily work as well when you’re talking to an executive manager, though.” Lucarelli continued. “We’ve been trained in the past 20-odd years to do results-based work in this field — and now you’re saying: explore, learn, experiment, fail?’ There is no failure as long as you learn.”

Managing risk in a culture of innovation

Lucarelli pointed out that an important consideration when building the labs was managing risk in a flexible environment designed for innovation. “We basically said: OK, we have a thick red line that we cannot cross. We cannot commit fraud, and we cannot hurt people with your experiments or steal their intellectual property. Those are things we absolutely cannot do. Then there are things we should do: we have to learn something, we have to test things, we have to bring in citizens’ voices. 

The interesting bit falls in the middle,” Lucarelli continued, “where there’s this massive grey area that we’re not regulating. If you make the end game super clear, make the ‘do not cross’ line clear, and leave everything else vague, it allows for innovation. That’s been the mantra that we have now. In fact, to close our bootcamps, we draw a circle on the floor and say: ‘Don’t do this. Do this. And everything in the middle? We don’t know.’.”

The question marks going forward

So what do you do with the unknown? “We need to find a smart way to strike a balance between the grey zone and flexibility.” Begovic said. “How do we get the labs to work on the most meaningful issues hitting the government, while also knowing there isn’t a quick fix? It’s not a shiny new app or something where you can cut the red ribbon with the minister.” 

When it comes to internal administration, the UNDP Accelerator Labs need to be able to show results. “But then how quickly can we show results?” Begovic asked. “What do those results look like in a context of massive depopulation, or a massive informal economy in Zimbabwe, for example?”

Looking to the future, Begovic said, “In a year or two, we’re going to know if the labs are a success, if our country offices look very different, or if the portfolio of issues that they work on looks really different. But of course, these question marks are all just part of the experience when the work you’re doing exists in that massive grey area in the middle.”

The UNDP Accelerator Labs are taking development into the 21st century to ‘future proof’ solutions. In a world where complex global challenges are increasing at unprecedented speeds, it is vital that we take meaningful, localized, and sustainable action while transforming institutions from the inside — which is precisely what Lucarelli and Begovic are doing. 

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