Newton Fund – Global Innovation Policy Accelerator.
Sector: Government
Our brief: The UK’s Newton Fund was set up to promote growth and social development around the globe as well as to promote trade and innovation links back to the UK. Our brief was to aid senior government officials to explore how to create policies that accelerate innovation in their countries. This initiative became the Global Innovation Policy Accelerator (GIPA).
What we did: Working with our partners Nesta, Cambridge Enterprise, Oxin, The University of Manchester and Uscreates we designed and delivered the first instance of GIPA. This was targeted at the 4 Pacific Alliance countries Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile. The programme was designed to expose participants to as much UK innovation best practice as possible, whilst creating practical experiential learning by running specific projects in each country. One of the key themes of the programme is ‘policy entrepreneurship’, in particular using prototyping techniques to create more effective policies.
What happened: GIPA participants fed back that the programme was a success on three levels. As individuals, people felt that they had learned cutting-edge innovation methods. As governments, the multi-ministry collaborations that were integral to our process design were judged to be successful examples of cross-governmental working. Regionally, many new relationships were formed across the Pacific Alliance that continue to bear fruit. Successful innovation projects that resulted from the programme included adding innovation to high schools in Peru, helping the high-value manufacturing sector in Mexico, improving white meat processing in Colombia and aiming to produce graduates who are more likely to become innovators in Chile.
This pilot GIPA project was judged to be a success by Innovate UK. 100%Open and partners tendered for the next phases and we are delighted to have co-delivered GIPA in south-east Asia in 2018 (Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines) and in India and Brazil in 2018/19. Finally, we delivered GIPA for the EMEA region (Jordan, Egypt, Kenya, Turkey and South Africa) in 2019/20.
