Over the last decade, development institutions from the Gates Foundation to the UN to social enterprises have embraced innovation as necessary to increase the impact of their work. In spite of this broad agreement, there is less understanding of how this actually works in practice. In my talk, I will introduce the UK’s Department of International Development’s (DFID) flagship innovation programme to examine some of the opportunities and constraints resulting from innovative practices in development. Amplify is an online crowdsourcing platform that aims to bring new actors into development and to connect them better with poor people, in order to design more effective solutions. It has succeeded in opening up funding opportunities to small, community-based organisations and in making application processes more flexible, but remains constrained by bureaucratic and fiscal structures.
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