USING INNOVATION INDUCEMENT PRIZES FOR DEVELOPMENT: WHAT MORE HAS BEEN LEARNED?
Authors: Roberts, J., Brown, C. and Stott, C.
Publisher: ITAD
Abstract:In 2013, the Department for International Development (DFID) proposed creating a new innovative programme, that would launch a number of innovation prizes to encourage research to develop and deploy technologies that would improve poor people’s access to affordable clean energy, safe drinking water and other climate/environmental services. Now known as Ideas to Impact (I2I), the programme is an action-research programme designing, implementing and testing innovation prizes, to induce innovative solutions to development challenges in Climate Change Adaptation, Energy Access and WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene). To avoid confusion with other types of prizes, I2I refers to them as ‘innovation inducement prizes’ or IIPs. As the programme’s Evaluation and Learning (E&L) team, Itad carried out a literature review on the use of IIPs in development to put I2I’s learning into context. When weighing up the final evaluation findings, the findings from the literature review will help the E&L team gauge how I2I’s results and experiences compare to what other people have found. What do they confirm or contradict? Does I2I have anything new to say? The main purpose of I2I’s evaluations is to find out for what purposes and in which settings IIPs are particularly useful in development, and what their strengths and weaknesses are, compared with other funding modalities available to funders.
Related to this, we had five research questions (RQs) we wanted the literature review to answer (see Summary of findings). We undertook wide-ranging Google Scholar searches, reviewed the references we had compiled since 2014 while working on the programme, and separately drew up a list of IIPs to help us look for any associated evaluations or reports (see Section 2.3 and Annex 1 for more details of the methods). While there is a lot of literature on prizes, we found little evidence to answer our questions.
Source: Manual