How do innovations in the world affect people

On this last point, it is also clear that frugal innovation principles can help meet pressing needs for quality, simplicity, affordability and sustainability in the context of different health, social and economic needs, in high-, middle- and low-income settings alike. Despite their merits, however, such efforts do not always receive a great deal of wider attention from the development community.

A rebalancing of the development innovation portfolio towards more coherent, strategic and sustained support for locally driven frugal innovation has become critical in the context of the pandemic response. Moreover, it points towards the kinds of changes that have long been called for in development and humanitarian policy and practice.

It is also conducive to creating new triangular partnerships, where knowledge is shared equally among all partners with a view to co-creating innovative solutions. As well as designing and delivering technical innovations, it is vitally important to ensure access to these innovations for those who are hardest to reach: the extremely poor; those who miss out because of their gender, ethnic group or sexuality; and those living in remote areas. It is also important to move beyond individuals and groups, and consider those regions or countries that are often excluded from the fruits of progress, technological or otherwise.

These include fragile and conflict-affected states; and, indeed, deprived areas and regions in high-income countries. Without a concerted effort, innovation will not benefit those most in need. With this in mind, the World Health Organization has endorsed the creation of a voluntary intellectual property pool whose content could be shared for developing drugs, vaccines and diagnostics, which would particularly benefit developing countries.

Also, open access to scientific work has been facilitated, where a large number of data and findings related to COVID have been made openly available to the international community. But more work is needed. Suggestions include problem analyses that specifically identify how marginalised populations are affected; innovative ideas that are developed and tested in close collaboration and partnership with these groups; and assessments of innovation proposals that examine to what extent and in what ways they benefit the poorest in line with the G7 Principles G7, [11].

For example, the following questions should be asked of each innovation project or initiative, with the poorest, most vulnerable and marginalised populations in mind:. How does this innovation address the needs, opportunities and interests of the poorest? How will they be involved in developing, testing and rolling out the innovation?

How will the poorest adopt, access and use the innovation? How will this innovation have a positive impact on their lives and livelihoods? A number of opportunities present themselves on the basis of the analysis above, which were tested with participants of a peer learning exchange across DAC members in June Building on the key messages set out above, these include:.

Improved decision-making would be supported by stronger and more coherent governance mechanisms that can take a big picture view of the current sector-wide effort; and identify potential gaps and areas needing more evidence or collaboration, as well as promising bright spots.

More should be done to encourage more collective thinking and action on adaptive and anticipatory innovations that can help to address the medium and longer term impacts of COVID Currently, with large numbers of dispersed, fragmented and political decisions, the overall innovation effort risks being less than the sum of its parts.

Collaboration should be expanded by building on this to ensure 1 more joined-up and collaborative investments, 2 reduce duplication and waste, and 3 strengthen collective efforts for stronger local and national innovation efforts. This will involve work to generate the political will and enabling environment for such changes, as well as tangible investments in strengthening local innovation ecosystems.

This means developing appropriate frameworks and processes to ensure that innovation efforts and outputs are as inclusive as possible as set out in message 3 above.

For example, this might involve determining needs at local and national levels, analysing how well the current portfolio is meeting these needs, and using these findings to determine innovation priorities. This includes DAC member donors e. The opinions expressed and the arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of OECD member countries.

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Key messages. Box 1. Innovation for development: what did we learn, pre-pandemic? A global perspective. A development and humanitarian overview. Figure 1. Table 1. How well is innovation for development working? Message 1: Innovation for development efforts have been more narrowly focused on improvements to products and processes. Message 2: A broader systems-based and transformational perspective is essential. Message 3: Innovation in development and humanitarian responses have focused more on mission-driven and enhancement-oriented innovation, and less on adaptive and anticipatory innovation.

Message 4: Collaboration in innovation investments and associated learning processes must be improved, especially across the global North—South divide.

Box 2. Message 5: Access to innovation is as much of a challenge as innovation itself. Proposals for progress. Ben Ramalingam. Abstract This paper focuses on innovation in development and humanitarian efforts in the context of the coronavirus COVID pandemic.

Introduction The COVID pandemic presents what is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges ever faced by international development and humanitarian organisations. These include: Lowering the cost of and access to vaccines and medicines in the poorest countries. Using cash transfers to enhance food security. Message 1: Innovation for development efforts have been more narrowly focused on improvements to products and processes As noted above, the pandemic has placed considerable demands on development and humanitarian organisations, which can also be seen as presenting a range of opportunities for innovation.

Message 2: A broader systems-based and transformational perspective is essential The incremental focus of current innovation efforts is often underpinned by a misplaced set of ideas about how innovations works in reality. Message 3: Innovation in development and humanitarian responses have focused more on mission-driven and enhancement-oriented innovation, and less on adaptive and anticipatory innovation While enumerating the investments in each of the four areas in financial terms is beyond the scope of this report, it was clear from publicly announced investments, interviews and facilitated discussions that two areas — mission-driven innovation and enhancement-oriented improvements — have been getting the majority of attention and investment.

Message 4: Collaboration in innovation investments and associated learning processes must be improved, especially across the global North—South divide Efforts within the DAC and the wider development community aim to improve the tracking of donor-funded innovations, including the work of the Global Innovation Exchange Global Innovation Exchange, [9].

Message 5: Access to innovation is as much of a challenge as innovation itself As well as designing and delivering technical innovations, it is vitally important to ensure access to these innovations for those who are hardest to reach: the extremely poor; those who miss out because of their gender, ethnic group or sexuality; and those living in remote areas.

For example, the following questions should be asked of each innovation project or initiative, with the poorest, most vulnerable and marginalised populations in mind: How does this innovation address the needs, opportunities and interests of the poorest? Proposals for progress A number of opportunities present themselves on the basis of the analysis above, which were tested with participants of a peer learning exchange across DAC members in June Building on the key messages set out above, these include: 1.

The ability to resolve critical problems depends on new innovations and especially developing countries need it more than ever. Innovation, by definition , is the introduction of something new. Because organizations are often working with other individual organizations, it can sometimes be challenging to understand the impacts of innovation on our society at large.

There is, however, a lot more to innovation than just firms looking to achieve competitive advantage. Innovation really is the core reason for modern existence.

Although innovation can have some undesirable consequences , change is inevitable and in most cases, innovation creates positive change. Over the last decades, innovation has become a significant way to combat critical social risks and threats. For example, since the Industrial Revolution, energy-driven consumption of fossil fuels has led to a rapid increase in CO 2 emissions, disrupting the global carbon cycle and leading to a planetary warming impact.

Our society revolves around continuous economic growth, which mainly depends on population growth. The population is shrinking and ageing in the developed counties and is likely to do so in other parts of the world as well. It's responsible for resolving collective problems in a sustainable and efficient way, usually with new technology. These new technologies, products and services simultaneously meet a social need and lead to improved capabilities and better use of assets and resources.

In order to be able to solve these kinds of societal problems, private, public and non-profit sectors are involved. Because innovation has an impact on so many different parts of our society, it would be almost impossible to go through everything in one post. In general, the result of innovation should always be improvement.

Technological innovation is considered as a major source of economic growth. Economic growth refers to the increase in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy over time.

It is conventionally measured as the percent rate of increase in real gross domestic product , or real GDP. The latter describes the essence of innovation quite well.

The purpose of innovation is to come up with new ideas and technologies that increase productivity and generate greater output and value with the same input.

If we look at the transformation of the US , once a largely agrarian economy that advanced from emerging nation status in the mid th century to an industrial economy by the First Wold War, we can see that the agricultural innovations and inventions were actually one of the largest factors that helped bring about the Industrial Revolution.

Vast improvements in agricultural productivity had already previously transformed the way people work in Europe, releasing farmers for other activities and allowing them to move to the city for industrial work.

The shift from hand-made to machine-made products increased productivity, directly affecting living standards and growth. Access to Finance Rwanda. Pivotal Ventures. Investment strategies designed for women Unlike men, female salaries are often re-invested in the family rather than the stock market.

Artificial sun. Artificial lighting to encourage food growth in extreme climates Using artificial light to encourage food growth is nothing new, but it is scaling up rapidly. The PaperWeight Armband. Wearables that can identify malnutrition The PaperWeight Armband is a tool that can identify malnutrition in a non-invasive way. Community innovations.

Promote access to basic services housing, transport, water and food, education, etc. Promote local employment Comply with all governmental regulations.

Squirrel AI Learning. Knowledge-sharing platform to improve teaching skills Teacherly aims to help teachers across the globe improve their teaching skills and share knowledge. Food forests. Desert Control. Liquid nano-clay can grow crops in deserts Norwegian company Desert Control has developed a concoction that can be sprayed on the sand in deserts to enable it to hold water and grow crops.

Water cleaned by the sun A paper published in the scientific journal Chem reveals that researchers have uncovered a material which can nullify disease-causing bacteria in water. Empowerment innovations. Encourage employee self-development and contribution Support the mental and physical health of employees Build collaborative partnerships.

Anonymous feedback platforms enabling employees to have a say Waggl is a feedback platform that lets managers, administrators, and employees share their sentiments in real-time. Uman AI. Workplace knowledge sharing via AI Uman AI is a collaboration platform for teams that thrive on knowledge. Limeade ONE. Apps to help the workforce feel engaged, heard, and supported Limeade is an interactive platform for employees that aims to improve the employee experience. Microsoft Japan.

Socially responsible robo-advisor Socially responsible investing SRI involves avoiding companies that sell addictive or abusive substances like alcohol, tobacco, etc. Environment innovations. Responsible consumption of natural resources, including clean energy Regenerative business model: No waste and circularity of resources Provide a safe and clean work environment.

University of the Philippines. Eco concrete Students studying civil engineering at the University of the Philippines created a concrete alternative from glass, fly ash, a common rock found on campus, and other recycled materials. Solar power use in heavy industry Heliogen is a solar power company that uses AI to concentrate and capture more sunlight than traditionally possible. Fake sunflowers. Solar panels that follow the sun Biomimicry at its finest, researchers at the University of California have developed artificial sunflowers.

Altered company. Regenerative agriculture Regenerative agriculture — which involves establishing farming, fishing, and grazing practices that are sustainable — is becoming more mainstream.

Regrarians is a company that educates farmers and designs farm plans to enable them to adopt regenerative agricultural practices. AI to predict and track wildfires Firemap is a tool that uses data-driven predictive modeling to identify areas at high risk of wildfires and track existing ones.

AI to minimize the impact of wildfires 20tree. Roads that charge electric vehicles Sweden built a road that charges electric cars while they drive. Harbour Air. Electric airplanes Harbour Air managed to create a 6-seater e-plane and fly it for 15 minutes. An action plan to transition to renewable energy globally by Stanford researchers have developed a detailed roadmap to tackle the climate crisis worldwide.

The Great Bubble Barrier. Bubbles to separate trash from rivers. Cost-efficient turbines for energy production Turbulent makes small, cost-efficient turbines that can be installed in rivers and streams that have minimal height differences to generate power.

Hong Kong University. While Moore's Law is the best known expression of the exponential growth in computing, the social effects of this growth are better captured by another observation known as Bell's Law. Bell's Law posits that, roughly every decade, hundredfold increases in computational ability create an entirely new class of computers.

Each class of machines becomes dramatically smaller in size, but has as much functionality as the class it displaces or more. The improved class then becomes a new nexus through which people exploit computational power in everyday life. Most Americans would recognize Bell's Law at work in the experience of the past half-century. In the s, mainframes were the primary locus of computing.

In the s, so-called "minicomputers" began their run, only to be succeeded in the s by personal computers. In the s, PCs were joined by laptops, and in the s "smart phones" appeared. It increasingly appears that, by the s, computers will be small enough to be routinely introduced as medical devices into the body, enabling ever-closer interaction between humans and computational machines.

Increases in processing power not only shrink the size of devices but also bring more and more social spheres into the domain of computation.

Journalism is increasingly an online enterprise that is ever-faster paced and more open to entry. Higher education is also migrating to the internet, as demonstrated by for instance Stanford's recent online course on artificial intelligence, which attracted , students from all over the world. Similar effects are visible in less peaceful pursuits: Drones are becoming the airpower of choice, and it seems quite possible that the last human fighter pilot has already been born.

Other areas of our lives are in the first stages of being shaped by the computational and information revolutions. Health care is certainly one of them: Genomics the digital analysis of the gene promises new kinds of research into the causes of disease and human behavior, with the possibility of significantly more personalized medicine. The potential of this research seems likely to grow as the cost of sequencing genes exponentially declines.

And in July , scientists published findings from the first computer simulation of an entire bacterium, a development that will help in generating and testing new cures for diseases. The energy sector, too, is taking advantage of the computational revolution with smart meters and grids designed to make electricity consumption more efficient. Nanotechnology also progresses more rapidly as computers make design on a molecular scale ever easier.

Moreover, these advances are essentially advances in the structuring and distribution of information and thus can be readily shared. Despite these extraordinary advances, some analysts, perhaps most notably George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, have argued in recent years that technology is stagnating and can no longer be expected to drive economic growth at rates we have come to expect. Much of Cowen's argument rests on the notion that economic deceleration is an indicator of technological deceleration.

The median income in the United States has grown much less rapidly since the s than it did in the decades before, and skeptics of technological advancement believe this trend shows that technology is no longer the engine of prosperity that it was in the midth century. In his recent book The Great Stagnation , Cowen writes that "there are periodic technological plateaus, and right now we are sitting on top of one[.

Stagnating median incomes are in fact the central concern of inequality critics. But median income growth in the United States actually provides a poor measure of technological acceleration, for three reasons that have a lot to do with the nature of technology itself.

First, the most common measures of median-income growth do not reflect the growth in fringe benefits. In recent years, total compensation for American workers has risen faster than wages alone, chiefly because of large increases in corporate outlays for health insurance. This increasingly generous insurance coverage, in turn, provides workers with greater access to America's technologically sophisticated health-care system. Cowen, for his part, argues that these increases have not produced real gains in well-being: Life expectancy in the United States is no better than it is in other industrialized nations that spend far less on health insurance.

But Cowen's argument fails to take account of various social and demographic factors less common in other developed nations that depress life expectancy in the U. For example, as Harvard economist N. Moreover, survival rates from some cancers and other complicated diseases are higher here, suggesting that Americans benefit from cutting-edge health-care innovations before those innovations become available to the rest of the world.

So important are these improvements that, in a television interview, former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers argued that it was unclear whether people would prefer to have the lower overall standard of living of but with today's health care, or today's higher standard of living with the lower health-care quality of Summers's observation suggests that improvements in health care alone have an enormous effect on personal well-being.

And as these technology-driven quality-of-life improvements are not measured by the formal metrics used to calculate standards of living, they are easily overlooked in our debates about income growth and inequality.

Second, median income may be the wrong metric to use in the first place. The growth in average mean per-capita income would provide a better proxy for growth, because it is unaffected by the distribution of the fruits of technological acceleration.

Over the past few decades, mean incomes have increased far more than median incomes, because higher-income individuals have done far better and improved their circumstances far more than the vast majority of Americans. Of course, income has taken a hit since the Great Recession of , but historically the economy has rebounded from such shocks. This increase in domestic income inequality in fact serves more as an indicator of technological acceleration than as evidence against it.

By and large, people with more education are better at using technology to improve their productivity than are people who lack education. Moreover, because technological improvement allows superstars within their fields to serve ever-bigger markets, it has boosted the incomes of the most talented and best educated Americans at the expense of the less talented and educated.

Income gaps would ordinarily exist between these two different groups, but technology seems to have widened them. Third and perhaps most important, technological acceleration is distorting measures of economic growth by transforming what one dollar can buy. To assess inflation, economists measure the prices of items in the same "basket" of goods every year.

But economists have suggested that these inflation measures are overstated, in part because, while they examine the same goods, they fail to account for improvements in the quality of those goods. A basket might include, for example, a new car.