Head of DFID's Innovation Hub

An excellent opportunity for someone who is passionate about innovation and wants to drive cultural change in DFID to lead a high profile agenda across the whole organisation, playing a prominent role engaging with the centre of government, ministers and leading international partners.

Innovation is a concept, practice and capability that increasingly defines successful organisations. Those organisations that consistently generate and execute new ideas tend to be more effective at achieving their goals, whether financial or social, and to be leaders in their fields. The coalition government has placed a strong priority on innovation. This financial year, all UK government departments will be benchmarked on their innovation capability as part of the next Capability Review.

In the field of international development, innovation is responsible for many of the biggest transformations in people’s lives in developing countries, from the green revolution and micro-finance to mobile banking and public-private partnerships.  But there is also a general recognition that the development community’s current approaches are not keeping up with the pace and nature of global change and are increasingly expected to achieve more with fewer resources. At the same time, more actors are entering the development and humanitarian arenas and the opportunities for novel partnerships, approaches, and financing models are unprecedented.

The International Development Secretary is driving DFID to strengthen its capability for effective innovation. To build on DFID’s existing innovation ethos and activities, he has established a number of initiatives to spur even greater innovation, including funds to generate innovations in humanitarian assistance, green technologies, financing models, and public-private collaboration.

For DFID, innovation in international development includes more than scientific discovery and new technologies. It embraces a wide range of policies, practices and techniques for achieving development outcomes. It is also more than ideas.  It is a dynamic process that begins with an idea but does not become an innovation until it is proven effective, useful and more broadly adopted. DFID plays different roles in this process, including innovator, catalyst, manager and connector.

Policy Division and Research and Evidence Division

The Innovation Hub will initially be located in DFID’s Policy Division which is responsible for providing top class policy analysis and practical policy advice on addressing the world’s major development challenges to ministers, other parts of the UK government, and the international community. Working closely on the evidence base with colleagues in the Research and Evidence Division, it tries to answer questions such as:

• How can the UK government promote income growth for poor people in a hugely unequal world?
• What policies and institutions should the UK help to create in order to stop the potentially devastating impact of climate change on the entire development endeavour?
• What practical steps should be taken to raise the quality of life and dignity for the 'bottom billion'?
• What are the most creative ways to catalyse new crop development, so that rural incomes are raised and nutrition improved?