How Do We Build an Innovation Culture that Lasts?

When our ITC Innovation Lab first launched, our goal was to reach a point where we would make ourselves irrelevant. It might sound counterintuitive to aim for your own extinction as a team, but our objective was to create a culture that no longer needed us to drive innovation. At the time, it felt poetic—even if we didn’t fully know what that would look like in practice.

Looking at the evolution of innovation teams within international organizations, one thing is clear: no two teams are the same. Some started as top-down initiatives, driven by senior management. Others emerged from the bottom up, created by junior or middle-level staff and later obtaining leadership support that helped secure initial funding.

Some innovation teams managed to secure long-term funding and expanded, while others faced downsizing or faded as leadership support decreased. This isn't necessarily a reflection of whether they succeeded in mainstreaming* innovation, but rather highlights that innovation teams face the same challenges that other teams inside bureaucratic structures: they rely on project-based funding and are vulnerable to political shifts.

The Hard Question for Innovation Practitioners

Should innovation teams still focus on nurturing an innovation culture, when it might be easier to pursue new solutions outside the bureaucracy?

In a previous post, I mentioned that bureaucracy costs the world around 9 trillion USD annually. If mainstreaming innovation can help reduce some of those costs, it’s worth considering the pathways to make innovation a sustainable, embedded part of an organization's DNA.

1. Innovation Teams as a Network of Focal Points

At the ITC Innovation Lab, we operate with a volunteer base, welcoming new members on a rolling basis to run activities. This leads to high turnover, but it also brings fresh ideas and energy. After nearly a decade, colleagues from various departments have been part of the Lab, learning and applying innovation methodologies to their own project work. We’ve effectively embedded “innovation champions” across different teams who can be called upon to support broader innovation efforts.

This volunteer-based model has worked well for engaging junior staff, who grow into leadership roles over time. However, engaging middle and senior-level managers requires more structure. Having formal innovation focal points across different teams—who are paid and tasked with aligning their work to strategic priorities—could be a more sustainable approach.

The glue that would hold it all together would be the endorsement and active support of innovation principles by senior management. An appropriate funding model should be also considered so that is not a function of only innovation teams to keep those focal point roles, but that other teams have their skin in the game too.

2. Innovation Teams as a Core Function for Incubation and/or Acceleration

For years, innovation teams have run incubation and acceleration programs to foster new solutions for humanitarian and development challenges. At the ITC Innovation Lab, we’ve experimented with various formats—from bootcamps for idea generation to longer-term support programs.

Our initial bootcamps were great for sparking new ideas and fostering collaboration but fell short in providing sustained support for pilot validation. A year-long support structure turned out to be too slow, losing momentum along the way. Eventually, we found success with a focused, three-month product-based program.

Iteration allowed us to find a suitable solution that met our organization’s needs. However, this hasn’t been the case other times, where we have tried to advance innovative initiatives that we couldn’t hand-over to appropriate teams, just because those teams lacked the capacity to manage them.  

This is when we learned that without an important involvement from the start of the natural owners, an innovation is unlikely to mature, and more than that, a culture is unlikely to mature either.

The role of incubation/acceleration of solutions can foster cultures of innovation if done appropriately. We need to find ways to decide which innovations are worth investing in, not only because they could imply a big change for our beneficiaries, but also because there is existing capacity in our organizations to take them forward, or at least the willingness to find new resources to fuel them.

*By mainstreaming we understand that innovation has permeated organisational processes, and teams, in a way that is sustainable.