Innovation

Pact is always looking to the future. The work we do today shapes the world of tomorrow, and we believe that innovation is critical to amplifying the impact of traditional development programs. We define innovation as the intentional application of creativity, human-centered design and local and external knowledge to improve our programs and processes to catalyze transformative ideas that accelerate results.

Alongside our capacity development practice, Innovation at Pact identifies, fosters and supports the growth of breakthrough solutions that center communities. We do this with a capacity development orientation, with the belief that Innovation is a transformational, cross-cutting capacity which accelerates, improves, and scales the pace and impact of our work. We utilize a bottom-up approach that supports capacity and innovative mindsets to create programs and solutions that are more innovative, participatory, and ultimately more impactful. 

In order for Innovation to thrive, to spark and sustain that transformational impact we aim for, Innovation at Pact is centered around three pillars: Creativity, Community and Iteration. These areas make up a system built for Innovation, and they also are what compose the infrastructure and mindsets we want to foster to see outcomes. We focus on developing this ecosystem individually and organizationally through our processes, our culture and most importantly our capacity. 

WHAT WE DO

Pact organizes our innovative capacities around the practices of increased creativity, deeper engagement with communities, and promoting greater flexibility and use of iteration in our programming. Examples of tools, approaches and methods we use: 

• Creativity – model mapping, creative and negative brainstorming, design sprints
• Community – Human-centered design (HCD), systemic design
• Iteration – low-fidelity prototyping/piloting, model validation 

Innovation Capacity Development and Mentoring — Pact works internally within the organization as well as externally with groups and organizations positioned to strengthen their adaptive capacity through providing innovation trainings that unlock new possibilities for the organization and create enabling environments for innovation to thrive.

Innovation Facilitation — Pact specializes in managing in-person and virtual innovation events such as innovation challenges, design thinking bootcamps, hackathons and other design sprint methodologies. These time-bound, high-impact events are designed to accelerate the ideation and prototyping process, resulting in greater collaboration, quicker decision making and de-risked investment.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) — Taking a qualitative, action-research focus to the application of HCD, Pact’s approach brings together interdisciplinary teams of community members, in-country staff, technical advisors, and HCD experts along-side end-user communities to understand specific challenges and opportunities of targeted populations. This process engenders more nuanced insight by engaging those typically overlooked or excluded from other participatory approaches. 

Over the past 8 years, Pact’s dedicated innovation practice has applied human-centered design in 11 countries across 5 continents, training 140+ global staff, partners and community members in the method. While every human-centered design exercise that we run at Pact is unique and tailored to the particular strengths and needs of the community in which we are working, we also utilize a framework that ensures our work is both centered around the community, and which effectively leverages the tools and strategies of design.