The Global Innovation Policy Accelerator is an unique attempt at jump-starting three types of collaborations to accelerate the development of an effective public innovation system. It aims to strengthen collaboration:

- Between the ministries and agencies within a national system

- Across a grouping of countries (for example the Pacific Alliance grouping of Western Latin American countries) and

- Between those groups of countries with the United Kingdom.

The Policy Accelerator is the first structured development programme designed to develop government innovation system capacity through the creation of a robust network of expertise sharing - particularly between a developed economy (the UK is consistently in the top 4 countries on the established ‘Global Innovation Index) and a range of emerging powers economies.

It is the first initiative directed at innovation system capacity building which focuses both on prototyping innovation policy projects based on cutting edge practice in the field, and on sharing lessons with other countries in the process. The unique selling points of the Global Innovation Policy Accelerator include:

- Bringing together the very best of what the UK system has to offer, through a delivery partnership comprising charities, leading UK universities, and private sector consulting expertise

- A distinctive action-focused design approach, helping policymakers identify pressing national challenges and immediately apply new knowledge, methods, experience and networks to address them.

- The integration of an intensive programme for Leaders in the UK with an in-country, lower-seniority programme for Programme Managers to maximise reach across system and help Leaders embed capabilities in implementation teams.

- Building peer networks and collaborative problem-solving capabilities within and between national and regional systems that will persist far beyond the programme duration.

- Developing and testing a proven model process and a set of high quality resources and workshops which has the potential to be replicated at scale, beyond the initial scope of the Newton Fund.

The lessons from this pilot run are being embedded in a revised Programme to be rolled out to 11 more countries in 2017-19. The team’s projects are evaluated according to their own system criteria, but also by the degree to which they foster new connections and networks between institutions within a country and internationally. This multi-layer collaborative approach can then be taken up and deployed much more widely within the institutions and agencies who have taken part in each country. For sponsoring UK innovation agency InnovateUK, GIPA acts as a ‘capstone’ programme: helping to link senior policymakers’ actions and planning to the benefits of the many international collaborative research projects being funded through the UK’s Newton Fund.

GIPA is by nature collaborative, promoting cross-system partnerships between participating countries. Working closely across a national system and with UK experts, the participants build a strong and supportive network of capability to unlock new opportunities to work together through the Newton Fund. The different GIPA stakeholders each brought separate skills for the overall impact:

- The UK partners from foundations, universities and consultancies brought technical expertise and evidence of what works in innovation policy.

- For each participating country GIPA engaged a local partner to help navigate the specificities of the national innovation system

- The UK government’s Science and Innovation Network officials brought diplomatic savvy and understanding of their national innovation system.

- Each policymaker team comprised 3-4 different innovation institutions, and through GIPA engaged a range of businesses and other stakeholders across the innovation system.

UK innovation agency InnovateUK’s vision for GIPA was to reach out to a stakeholder group previously missing from the international research collaborations of the Newton Fund: very senior policymakers setting the framework for innovation collaborations. So GIPA’s mandate from commissioning has been to include a previously-excluded group from such kinds of development programmes. The structure of the Programme engages stakeholders from across national innovation systems, connects them with counterparts in other ‘emerging economy’ countries, and with UK policymakers. Each team project developed through GIPA engages directly with innovation policy ‘users’ and beneficiaries: these would include entrepreneurs and business in each country GIPA operates with, and, because of the overseas development aid focus of the sponsoring Newton Fund, each project also seeks to directly benefit the underprivileged in society, and tackle pressing national challenges for the benefit of all citizens.

GIPA was successfully piloted in 2016-17 in the four countries of the Pacific Alliance: Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. To give a Leaders project example, the Chilean team chose to design and run a pilot programme of creative and innovative learning for technical colleges across the country. Post-programme, the team continues collaboratively working on their project, having secured follow-on funding from their organisations. Skills developed through GIPA include:

- Better identification of new challenges and scoping collaborative projects to tackle them

- Adoption of design for policy approaches and the adaption of models or practices from the UK and elsewhere to national context and priorities.

To-date, the other primary benefits stem from the networks that were built through the Programme. Examples include:

- GIPA participants (from Chile, Mexico and Peru) designing and running a session at the prestigious South by Southwest conference, independently from the Programme

- A 2017 Chilean conference bring together Pacific Alliance country innovation agency directors with Policy Accelerator delivery experts - not a topic which was on their diplomatic agenda before the Policy Accelerator

- New streams of funding from the IDB to support collaboration for innovation across the Pacific Alliance

- supporting the new agenda on innovation policy collaboration fostered by the Policy Accelerator

The expected longer term impact:

- A sustainable international network of innovation policymakers across the 15 countries involved

- built from a core of alumni from GIPA - A stronger understanding of what works in international collaboration on innovation policy

- A set of successful new innovation policies and programme developed teams who participated in the Programme.

- An important tool in the UK government’s agenda to be seen as a global hub for knowledge and expertise on innovation policy and its development

Given the experimental nature of the Policy Accelerator, we encountered some challenges during the pilot run. As we roll the programme out to other countries and regions, we are responding to these in the following ways:

- Managing personal and inter-agency dynamics within teams was more challenging than expected

- we are designing a more structured, tailored programme of team coaching support that will run throughout the programme

- Some teams had difficulty defining a clear project

- we will frontload and boost the support provided by project mentors

- Some teams found it hard to communicate what they were doing to senior national stakeholders

- we will offer more ‘pitch coaching’ and help teams create a communications strategy for their projects early on

- We did not share enough information with participants about the design choices that underpinned the Accelerator

- we have built a ‘blueprint’ to help participants navigate the programme and know when they have to do what.

We see three conditions in the success of a programme like GIPA:

- Firstly, building trust between the participants. This can be achieved by convening groups of similarly senior policymakers in a safe space, away from their daytoday activities to specifically talk about challenges they share.

- Secondly, the participants’ openness and willingness to collaborate. Participants from different countries bring different perspectives, but the programme wouldn’t work if participants were not interested in the benefits of collaboration. Participant selection is therefore critical.

- Finally, the ability to balance the focus between team projects and the process of collaboration itself. We expect national projects to generate change in the long term, but nine months is not long enough to demonstrate major change at a national level. The processes behind projects (team dynamics, motivations to open up to and scale collaboration, adopting new points of view, etc.) are more important.

The Global Innovation Policy Accelerator has been specifically designed to be scalable in two ways:

- Firstly it was designed to provide a consistent by flexible generic structure informed by its learning objectives: to be collaborative, action-oriented and challenge led. The main elements of a collaborative small senior team and the structured programme of support is held constant at any programme scale and for any number of countries.

- Secondly, an ‘end-to-end’ coherent process tailoring the Programme was conceived from the beginning: starting with a research phase which maps institutions and key policy challenges for each nation, the provision of control of topic and content choice according to the needs of the national team, and a close partnership between UK expertise and local partner assets. The emerging network of participant ‘alumni’ provide a constantly growing set of expertise to draw on for future iterations.

We have 3 main lessons to share from running the Policy Accelerator pilot:

- Only a ‘safe space’, removing participants from their day-to-day environments and work pressures, can give them the chance to reflect deeply on challenges they face, and share lessons with each other about what works and what does not.

- In introducing design tools to participants, (prototyping, user personas, etc.) practice what you preach: make sure programme tools are tested and tailored for the different situations that different national and international context require.

- Collaboration at different levels, within organisations but also across countries is crucial. Participants have underlined how much they valued the opportunity to meet with their counterparts in different countries, after realising they were sharing many challenges.

Feedback from senior innovation policymakers from the Pacific Alliance countries run of GIPA: “This programme is different because it was able to gather different stakeholders from across Mexico and Latin America to discuss in a quick and focused way what can be improved and main challenges faced”

– Mexican innovation agency director “It is very new to have all of us together in one room, working and sharing experience, information, data, strategies. It is very important because it is something we are not used to, that culture of collaboration with others”

– Chilean innovation official “I think it’s a great advantage to be working with other countries. Personally, I didn’t realise how important it was. I had no idea that they were encountering the same problems that we were. It could be great to see how to continue, even after the Accelerator, to see how we can benefit from each other’s experiences and good practices”