By Juliaty Sopacua, SDG Advisor, UNDP Indonesia and Patrick Duong, Local Governance Advisor, UNDP Regional Hub for Asia and the Pacific.
The defining global health crisis of the modern age, the COVID-19 pandemic is changing lives of millions of Indonesians, many of whom live in small villages across the archipelago.
A fisherman living in Ponelo village of Gorontalo province is losing his source of income, as the fish markets are closed due to the social restrictions implementation to curb the spread of the COVID-19. …
Interview with Alexandru Oprunenco, Head a.i. of the Regional Innovation Center, Bangkok Regional Hub UNDP
Cross posted from GovInsider by Yun Xuan Poon
“Covid-19 has been an important and timely test for governance systems around the world, emphasising need for acceleration of new governance models,” says Alexandru Oprunenco, Head a.i. of the Bangkok Regional Hub, United Nations Development Programmes’ Regional Innovation Center. “The speed and complexity of changes have increased dramatically.”
In just the past year, governments have had to adapt quickly to face pressing challenges. Many have ramped up the use of tech, and restructured teams and processes. …
By Doina Ghimici
Magnifying many existing question marks and prompting new ones is just one of the many ways in which COVID-19 pandemic has changed our world in 2020. Both the pandemic and the question marks will accompany us in the New Year. If the pandemic may be gradually defeated by the end of next year, many questions will remain. Among the questions that will likely not fade away is whether we should continue taking political goodwill for granted and assuming that governance systems and elected leaders truly work for the public good.
by Courtney Savie Lawrence, Head of Exploration
Fully wrapping our arms around a system is a luxury we no longer have. So rather than writing up maps, we should carry a compass. — manifesto
2020 has been a year of deep shocks and jolts. Many plans have been put on pause or re-considered, and to adapt, many organizations have been discovering new ways of navigating the complexity in real time. Although working with and towards ‘innovation’ is not a new endeavor for UNDP, what has become more explicit, is an intent to shift away from single point solutions and towards…
An Update from our systemic design journey to fight plastic waste in Asia
by Alex Oprunenco, Brent Wellsch, Shumin Liu
When we last left you, we were in the midst of launching our initiative looking to address the complexities of plastic waste management in Asia and the Pacific. As outlined in our initial blog by Alex, the Regional Innovation Centre in Bangkok is engaging in an ambitious undertaking by applying a systemic design approach for seeding new ways of thinking and acting in response to the plastic waste challenge. Specifically, we are working in 4 countries (Vietnam, Maldives, Pakistan, and the Philippines) and in each utilizing systemic design as a convening methodology by…
by Itziar Moreno and Gorka Espiau, the Agirre Lehendakaria Center
*This post is cross posted and a part of the collaborative learning that the UNDP’s Strategic Innovation Unit has embarked on with various units within the organization and a range of external partners who are interested in strategic innovation approaches that seek to transform systems.
International Institutions, public authorities (national and regional governments, local authorities, municipalities), corporates and civil society organizations are looking for systemic responses to complexity. They increasingly agree that complex issues cannot be tackled by applying single point solutions, but as we all know, this is easier…
by Ishtiaque Hussain
This week, the global Covid death toll passed the tragic total of one million, with some speculating that the true figure could be higher due to lack of reporting in many parts of the world. The World Health Organization predicted that the doubling of that figure is ‘very likely’. But it is not unavoidable. …
This is a 2-part post from the series sharing the the Regional Innovation Teams’ experimental journey socializing portfolio approaches and systems transformation work across the Asia Pacific UNDP Country Offices (CO). We’ll be focusing here on some of our most recent work supporting the rollout of the second generation of Accelerators Labs in the region.
Part 2— Introducing new methods
“If uncertainty is indeed ‘unmeasurable,’ visual representation of issues might help uncover emergent properties of the system that allow for perpetual learning.”
Milica Begovic, UNDP Global Innovation Advisor, ‘Strategic innovating funding in times of radical uncertainty’
As described in Part 1, a more guided onboarding…
or: What can an organization like UNDP learn from Haier?
We know that some organizations are navigating uncertainty better than others. Some organizations are agile and adaptable, while others are static and inflexible. Haier, the largest global producer of consumer appliances, has not only continuously illustrated its agility during the past 20 years but has also been more successful in navigating the Covid-19 crisis than any other large global business conglomerate, including Google and Apple.
The organizational model that constitutes the basis for Haier’s agility is called RenDanHeyi[1] — in a direct quote from Haider CEO Zhang Ruimin,
This is a 2-part post from the series sharing the the Regional Innovation Teams’ experimental journey socializing portfolio approaches and systems transformation work across the Asia Pacific UNDP Country Offices (CO). We’ll be focusing here on some of our most recent work supporting the rollout of the second generation of Accelerators Labs in the Asia-Pacific region.
Part 1 — Seizing the opportunity of a “2.0”
With COVID-19 fresh in the backdrop, UNDP reaffirmed its organizational commitment to systems transformation work, and the Accelerator Labs as an integral component to this, by announcing the launch of a second generation of 30 additional labs. In the Asia Pacific, that means 19…
Regional Innovation Centre UNDP Asia-Pacific
In the Asia-Pacific region, we are interpreting the renewed mandate for innovation as an opportunity to reframe: follow us and contribute as we explore
