The burden of innovation: Proof

 Clearly an innovator has the obligation to show that an innovation works before promoting its widespread adoption.  In this and the next five posts, I’ll tell Freedom from Hunger’s story of how we tried to meet this obligation and had to deal with unanticipated consequences.

In 1988, Freedom from Hunger started to innovate in the use of group

-based lending to women (with savings and education built into an integrated package of services) as a vehicle for effective and widespread public health nutrition intervention.  From the start, our board (including some prominent academic nutritionists) was skeptical.  They wanted evidence of impact on nutritional status of children under the age of five years (the “canary in the mine” of family nutrition).  Having an academic research background.

There can be a conflict of interest in being a practitioner going out on a limb to start up an innovative program—particularly in our situation. We were proposing to transform our organization with this innovation; this was more than an exploratory experiment to complement a tried-and-true “core” program approach.  We were driven by evidence from external program evaluators in the mid-1980s that much of what our organization had been focusing on was not working.  But they also found that parts of what we had been doing seemed to be effective and responsive to wants and needs of the poor.  We combined and improved these apparently good parts to become our Credit with Education program (as it later came to be labeled for branding purposes). 

While the components were not really new, the delivery package was radical for many inside and outside Freedom from Hunger.  We had to commit to the innovation in front of board, donors, peers, and of course participants well before we could be fully confident that this innovation would work.  The organization’s survival in effect was bet on this innovation proving to be effective and replicable to large scale.  What if the impact research showed that Credit with Education was not effective and/or not replicable?

With such high stakes, the conflict of interest should have ruled out doing the research ourselves.  But we could not find sophisticated researchers willing and able to do the research.  Like the Little Red Hen, we just had to do it ourselves.  Counting on our intellectual honesty and demonstrated integrity to make the research credible, we were prepared to abandon or substantially adjust the innovation, if our faith in Credit with Education proved to be misplaced.  In hindsight, this whole scenario appears foolhardy!  But we had a sense of having our organizational back against the wall.  More important, we were determined to make a bold effort to actually do good development rather than simply survive as an organization.