Innovation at the Frontlines of Global Hunger with Sandra Raad, UN WFP Innovation Accelerator

Sandra Raad has spent a decade building innovation capacity inside one of the world's most complex humanitarian organisations. Her verdict? Innovation is not a silver bullet - and in a world where 318 million people face acute hunger, that clarity matters.

In this episode, Sandra (Head of Innovation Network at the United Nations World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator) joins Innovation Brief co-hosts Gabriella G. Hernandez and Stephanie Shaar to talk about what innovation actually means when lives are on the line - not the shiny tech version, but the unglamorous, human-centred, politically aware work of making new ideas stick inside large institutions under extreme pressure.

Sandra explains what WFP Innovation has built over the past decade: an award-winning community of 600 internal champions, AI-enabled supply chain tools that generate millions in savings, and programmes designed from the ground up for people living in fragile, conflict-affected environments. 

At WFP, innovation is fundamentally about doing more with less - stretching every dollar further, compressing delivery timelines from weeks to hours, and finding smarter pathways to reach more of the 318 million people facing acute hunger today. She also talks honestly about what innovation cannot do - replace political will, resolve structural inequality, or prevent crises. In a humanitarian context, innovation is a powerful enabler, but it works alongside structural change, not in place of it.

We also go somewhere most innovation podcasts don't: the emotional weight carried by people doing this work, why protecting innovators' mental health is a leadership responsibility, and how Sandra herself navigates hope and resilience when the world feels relentlessly difficult.

If you work in innovation, impact, or humanitarian response - or if you simply want a more honest conversation about what it takes to make ideas matter - this one is worth your time.

Learn more and get involved:

• UN WFP Innovation Accelerator: 
  https://innovation.wfp.org/
• Support WFP via the Share the Meal app - it costs less than $1 to feed one person for a day: https://sharethemeal.org/
• Connect with Sandra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-raad/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Innovation Brief, the podcast where we have real conversations with leaders driving meaningful change across the globe. I'm Gabriela Hernandez. And I'm Stephanie Shar.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Each episode, we bring you insights from innovators who are shaping the future through bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and transformative work.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Today, we're joined by Sandra Rad, head of the UN World Food Program Innovation Network, where she has spent the last decade working across program policy to scale up enablement to community engagement with the purpose of supporting innovation for zero hunger.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, with a background in brand, business and service design consulting, from London to Munich and further afield, Sandra's committed to building infrastructure that allows innovation to thrive and usher in a more equitable and sustainable world.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Whether you're an entrepreneur, policymaker, corporate leader, or simply curious about the future of innovation, this conversation will give you a first perspective on how bold ideas, emerging technology, and human creativity can come together to help address some of the most pressing issues of our time. Let's dive in. Welcome, Sandra. Thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

Thank you both. It's a really pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

All right, let's dive in. Could you start by telling us about your role and the work that you and your team do at the World Food Program?

SPEAKER_02 1:17

Yeah, sure. Well, maybe for your listeners that aren't very familiar with WFP, I can maybe start by giving you some context. So our latest analysis shows that there's about 318 million people facing acute hunger. And within that context, the World Food Program is the largest organization worldwide, humanitarian organization working to eradicate hunger. And within the World Food Program, we founded an innovation accelerator about 10 years ago. And I am part of the leadership team of the Innovation Accelerator. And my team specifically focuses on making innovation possible, practical, and scalable across a quite large and complex organization, as you can imagine. So my team specifically focuses on building internal communities and helping not own innovation, but rather enable the uptake and the adoption of innovation across all of our operations and together with the governments that our operations work with.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Very important work. One of the things, you know, that we like to ask our guests is what does innovation mean to you? And maybe what isn't it? Particularly when you're thinking of solving such an important issue, such as hunger.

SPEAKER_02 2:37

I mean, that's always a very complex and difficult question for me personally to answer. I think sometimes innovation is a mindset, it can be a process, it can be many things. For sure, what it is at WFP is really at the heart of our mission, and it has been our mode of operation even before we had like a formal innovation function within the organization. So I can start with that at WFP. I think innovation is, you know, first and foremost, a mindset, a decision, a decision to try and solve problems with new ways and a commitment to ensuring that we're always putting forward the most ingenious and kind of thought-provoking, future-looking solution within, of course, the risks and the means that are available at our disposal. Today, however, of course, there's a technical kind of aspect to innovation as well, kind of really helping us redefine what is possible in humanitarian response. So, really looking at AI-enabled tools, we're looking at specific kind of financial uh innovation, financial payments and systems. We're really looking at business models that our country offices or our operations or the innovators we work with adopt to ensuring that the work becomes more sustainable over time, less dependent on kind of government uh funding and also partnership models and more of like the service aspect of innovation is also a core core part. And then I think even now, in this stage of our innovation maturity, I think also as a UN organization, there's a big focus lately also on kind of people-centered innovation in general and kind of putting forward sort of solutions, means of support to our kind of the brains within WFP and the people that are on the front lines and helping them deliver with the best possible. So, really looking at uh adaptable toolkits really quickly and that people can adopt quite quickly, or offline facilitation frameworks and so on and so forth, so that you can kind of really look at that. I think the unique aspect of innovation at WFP is it has to really work for vulnerable populations, which are the ones that we support. Uh, sometimes they're we're looking at areas of digital divide or infrastructure gaps, and it's a big game of adapting technical innovations that might work in a country like Germany where I'm based at the moment, but might need quite a bit of adapting and retooling for a different context in Somalia, which is why we also try to support as much as possible local innovation from the ground up rather than also like a transplant of technologies from different parts of the world. Yeah, I think in the end, what we're looking at when what we're focused on from an innovation perspective really is the end game. And for us at the moment, every dollar we need to invest needs to give us much more return than it does in the private sector, I would say. And we're looking at almost between four and uh $10, uh a range of between four and ten dollars for every dollar invested in cost saved or cost avoided, as well as dramatic reductions in delivery, uh and dramatic reduction in time delivery, I mean. So kind of really taking innovations that help us deliver in hours instead of weeks, and that also is a core aspect of what we're trying to chase and trying to ensure that we can make accessible to our operations.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

So thank you so much for that. You touched on this briefly earlier. Come from a background in brand and art direction, publishing and business design, and those are disciplines that aren't always associated with the humanitarian work. So, how has that creative and commercial lens shaped the way that you think about systems change?

SPEAKER_02 6:37

I think it has been really helpful actually to have a bit of a design background in the sector that I work with. I think when I joined WFP 10 years ago, I felt like very much like an outsider. And and I had forgotten up until the time the day I applied, I had forgotten that I had like work at the UN on my vision board as a 12-year-old. But I had done nothing in my actual formal formal training or formal career to get there. Like I didn't study policy or law or economics or your traditional kind of fields of studies that would get you into an international organization setup. Of course, from a personal perspective, I had always been interested in social issues, but that was the extent of my, you know, my input into getting into a UN career. So 10 years ago, I really felt like an outsider and always wondering like, what do I have to offer in an organization like the UN? But I think my training and the background that I bring, and also some of my colleagues now also share and bring the same background as actually very helpful in an organization like ours. First of all, because you're used to a different level of speed, and you've experienced an expectation of getting from design to execution in much shorter time frames than maybe the traditional kind of UN bureaucrat is interested in or is has experienced. So I think that those frameworks of time and of what's possible in a week or what's possible in a workshop and what is the outcomes that we can get out of them have helped me put some like a different level of quality expectation. I think the design training also helps you make a lot of connections and bring uh collaboration. And I think this is one of the key aspects that I see are in high demand right now, even as kind of, especially because technology moves at a pace that you can't necessarily catch up to. I think the the art of being able to facilitate collaboration, I mean to collaborate as a collaborator, as an innovator, but also as a connector to be in between and be able to bring about that collaboration and help folks from the government as well as the private sector and then intergovernmental organizations and maybe local innovators and a startup and a and a bank come together and think about something they can do together. Like design really teaches you the tools to do that. So I think that was really helpful for me to come about. And I think a general curiosity and more of like this fresh perspective of, hey, I wonder how might I change this? And I think that that's I think right now, of course, in retrospect, I was like, ah yeah, I was so naive at the beginning or like so innocent. But you know, I had always these questions of like, but why is this this way? Like, I am, I mean, why can't we change it? I think overall, I'm lucky that I ended up working at WFP because I think WFP is the least bureaucratic UN agency and is the most agile. So it wasn't also such a big, big stretch. But I think in the end, maybe it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. And the curiosity that you learn, that you learn to nurture as a muscle, I think, in design helps a lot in trying to solve complex problems like, you know, supply chain, for example, or others. So it's quite cool, I think.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Yeah, it does sound like agility and flexibility are the keywords here. So building on that, you've previously described yourself as a south-north and east-west connector. So, how does that perspective shape the way that you design infrastructure for innovation? And why does that kind of bridge building matter so much in this work?

SPEAKER_02 10:16

I've recently come to that realization about myself and about some of my colleagues also that are of similar background and the nature of the innovation in an organization like WFP. I think first and foremost, I think diversity is a factor in success, I think, for innovation. So I think though it studies have shown that if you have a diverse team, whether from background but also from gender and from life experiences, you tend to have much more successful products and businesses. And that's not me saying it. So I think the accelerator to the credit of our founder has made it a point and to ensure that we they're hiring kind of diverse teams from the beginning. And I think specifically, I grew up in Lebanon, and I think that's a training in and of itself in adapting and in being agile and in also maintaining a commitment to execute and see things through and not get discouraged by external factors. And I think that helps a lot. I think it also helps to be a translator of a lot of innovation concepts that tend to be created in Western economies. So a lot of the literature on innovation, at the moment, many of the technical advances that we have from innovation come from Western countries, and but they're not necessarily thought through for the type of operations that the World Food Program operates in, whether those are the kind of low infrastructure or low connectivity or really complex conflict environments that don't necessarily provide the stability that you have in other countries where you have acceleration frameworks that don't just apply in countries like Somalia and others. So I think having also being able to use that in-between of being someone that understands and can speak the languages of innovation in a Western world, but has lived the realities of an emerging country that continuously tries to get to stand up, but can but and and for whatever reason faces adversity across the board and still continues to innovate, I think is a is a is a key advantage. And I see my colleagues that thrive are the ones that are able to translate these. I think it's the other way around as well. I think there's sometimes an assumption that knowledge and progress flows from north to south and from west to east. And I I love to demystify this. And I'm I always love to that I really like that our work helps us highlight local innovators and folks that are really tapping into local ingeniousness and kind of bringing it upward and teaching the north. And I think also there's a lot of applicability and applied innovation and applied design that you see in the countries that WFP operates, that folks that are used to the stability in the north where innovation frameworks are created can't even imagine. So I think those are this is also a very important part of my mission and my job personally to kind of try to demystify also where does progress come from and who needs to listen to whom, when, and kind of trying to to make that also a humble and non-confrontational process. I think that that's also a key aspect in helping everybody just let down their guard and relax and listen to each other.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

You've moved through several roles within the World Food Program over the past decade. So, like you from program policy officer to the role that you sit in now. And what do each of these kind of transitions teach you about how innovation actually gets embedded into large institutions like the World Food Program, the UN?

SPEAKER_02 14:06

Yeah, I mean I touched on this before. I think when I first joined, I couldn't feel, I couldn't be, I think objectively really wasn't, but also didn't feel like I belonged in an organization like WFP. I felt that everyone knew much better and much more than me. And I came with this innovation knowledge, but with nowhere to put it in a sense, like no other peers to discuss it, always thinking of myself as a troublemaker, always being looked at as a troublemaker. So in the end, now I think it's a nice journey because now my team, like we focus specifically on creating this environment for WFP innovators and helping them feel welcome and valuable, and also that they have a role to play. So I think we've synthesized my and other innovators' experiences into our offering right now. And we focus on a few things. First of all, I think uh vocabulary, like having similar vocabulary to talk about similar things, that was one of the things I struggled with with the most, or I experienced in terms of resistance. We would be myself and my colleague talking about the same things, but I'm using different words because I don't come from the sector. So I think really looking at like common vocabulary and demystifying innovation and removing the buzzwords as I as I kind of usher some of those concepts into my work, helping those that are innovators. I think there's a lot of like innate innovators at WFP that also don't have formal innovation training. So the other way around, and helping them gain creative confidence and practice getting that awkward phase that you have in the beginning when you're starting to innovate and you're you're still stumbling through and you're not really confident in your in your instincts, and just creating spaces for people to practice in like a low stress environment. It's a core part of what the network at the moment offers. So we offer this community of champions, and we have about 600 champions that those are internal WFP colleagues and employees that come together once a month. They learn, they learn about AI, they learn about whatever buzzword or whatever new technique is out there, they learn about innovations that have succeeded, that have failed. And you kind of just demystify it and make it easy and simple for folks to do that. So that's kind of a first world, like on culture, on skills, on peer network. I think those are really essential for folks not to feel alone. And in an organization like ours, where you have a lot of people that move around from one operation to the other, that tends to become an asset because then people take those concepts and take them into a new operation. So it helps us, it helps us with spreading the message. There's of course a category of like really putting forward like real hard resources for people that need to innovate. I think this, I don't want to also gloss over, it's not only on the individual. Like I think there's a responsibility for the organization to create a space with resources for people that seek to innovate, or especially if innovation is a core value or as an objective or as a goal of that of that organization. Which is where, for example, WFP 10 years ago created an innovation accelerator, really as like this space to experiment with cash. Like people get funding to do innovation. So I think this is essential. I don't think that this, and now we think about it as like old news, but it's really still like a core part of what makes the model quite successful is that people get money to test ideas in a cash-strained environment. Sometimes that's the thing that differentiates whether you can or cannot. But resources is not only money, it's also people that have the expertise and are willing to give the time. So, kind of having people that know how to hash out the quick business model or really look at an innovation journey or trying to accelerate through an innovation framework or understand VC culture and try to bring it to the world of the UN, I think is quite useful and help to create these parallels or these transferable concepts between those worlds that would otherwise have a hard time mixing. Resources can also look like external mentors, access, partnership, a platform to talk visibility. So I think really organizations at the moment, right now, you need those areas to make sure that you have some uptake. Otherwise, it's it's a bit, yeah, it's difficult. Like it's not only on the individual to upskill. There's a lot of leadership buy-in, of course, that's needed. There's, I think, in my experience, a little bit of also leadership education that you need to kind of bring up. You need to make them care. And in order to make them care, you need to change your pitch. You need to talk about it in a way that resonates with what their priorities are, of course. And I think you need to have also, we need sometimes from an innovation perspective, if you're someone like me coming from the outside 10 years ago, you have to talk about what I would have said, like the boring things, like, you know, risk or talk about procurement, or like basically how do we work with external businesses. And and yeah, those are boring topics from an innovation perspective. But for an organization like ours, those are the building blocks for how innovation becomes easy and there's and we limit the obstacles and the blockers that may stand in your way. So I think really not shying away from tackling those boring, I don't know how to call them, like um, you know, blockers, I would say, institutional blockers, really kind of thinking about risk frameworks for innovation and trying to make it um manageable and quantifiable in a way where also risk is not overly estimated, but still allowed. Otherwise, you can't really uh innovate. Like how so yeah, I think overall, I think it's important that innovation, and it has been my experience that for leaders to listen, I think you want to make sure that innovation is always rooted in solving real problems and that we're not focusing on innovation for innovation's sake, which might be a syndrome that you see sometimes. Innovation as a navel grazing kind of um mechanism of trying to only reinforce the things we're good at. I think no, it's really important to try to solve hard problems and bring evidence and focus on those conversations with your leadership and with the decision makers and the gatekeepers and not shy away from engaging with them openly, yeah, in an honest way, I think would is quite essential, I have found.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

Yeah, thank you for that. And speaking of the real and hard problems, can you walk us through a specific innovation that your team has supported from you know its earliest stage to where it is today? And maybe tell us a bit about what that journey actually looked like on the ground?

SPEAKER_02 20:56

Yeah, I mean, there's a number of innovations right now. For example, in 2025, WFP has supported 85 innovations. And those innovations have reached, I think, about 130 million people. So it's a massive portfolio that we have. And out of that, there's a lot of examples of innovations that are really tackling difficult problems. One of my favorite is really on supply chain optimization. It sounds boring, but really like an AI tool that helps WFP know when to buy food, from where, at which moment, where to store it, when to distribute it so that it saves the most amount of money, but also cost, ensures that nothing goes to waste. And it has helped us create real millions of dollars of savings in a really short period of time. One of the innovations that I wanted to bring to the podcast today is one that I personally manage because I think that that helps me also give you the most real experience. And at the moment, it is no longer active, it's kind of like we started it 10 years ago, but that was the reason. I joined the World Food Program, and it was one of so in Lebanon, we have a large population of refugees, and one of the areas that we wanted to explore was kind of really looking at digital work and the gig economy in the private sector and trying to find a way for us to create a program where this could be applied within the assistance kind of the UN context. So that was one of the initial projects that I worked on. It's called MPACT. And now we have like a spin-off that is delivered together with a private sector company, which is a much better model. But the one that I had worked on before was a fully internal innovation for the World Food Program, where we basically train some of the people that we we work with and we try to serve on basic digital skills, on you know, being graphic designers or or or even annotators or whatnot for kind of micro work and others, machine learning, data annotation, et cetera. And then we connect them with job providers on online. And the basic hypothesis was that people move around. And this was also, I think, one of the key reasons why I wanted to highlight this was this wasn't a traditional type of innovation or area of work for the World Food Program at the time. But it was a really needed new things to introduce because we were for the first time working with a refugee population that was different from the refugee populations that we had before. So the refugee population in Lebanon came from Syria. It was a very well-educated refugee population, most often master's degree and doctors and engineers that suddenly found themselves to be refugees. And right now it may seem like, yeah, of course, but at the time, 10 years ago, that was new for us. I think it was new. I think before we were, we, it was a different environment of and a different environment of people that we were trying to support. So I think the core aspect of that innovation, first and foremost, was to really stop and observe and listen and see, you know, who are the people we are trying to design for, what is the ultimate support that we can provide them and start from there rather than bring a cookie cutter type of program and implement it. So starting from that, really listening to who they were, what they needed in order for them to participate, and matching that with some of the ambitions that we had. So we had, for example, ambitions to try to do a new program for a new type of in the private sector, you would call them a customer, right? So a new type of customer. And we, for example, we had a goal that we wanted 50% participation of women. What does that look like? That looks like really putting some real services there, real services for the women to ensure that they can participate. Childcare services, transport, private bathrooms, female teachers for those that come from conservative communities, an onboarding process that reassures parents that this is not a scam and the women are not going to get taken advantage of, a certain amount of training for teachers and for others. So, and of course, WFP didn't deliver all of those on our own because this is not our core expertise, but we did partner with organizations whose specialty it is to create these types of services and try to put them in place so that we design the environment, we designed the entire program from the onset to make sure that it is as human-centered as possible. And there are concepts that are similar in the World Food Program. You sometimes use they call them, you know, adaptation kind of, you know, people adaptation or people at the center of programs. In the design world, you would call this human-centered design. And I think that was one of the core aspects that this innovation had brought, which was not necessarily a high-tech innovation, but really more a process, a service design innovation. And kind of really also designing the facilities or setting up the facilities to ensure that we are able to receive people with disabilities, that we are able to see the receive young mothers and others. So I think that was one of the key things. The innovation eventually scaled to seven countries, and we had uh thousands of people that were trained on digital skills. One of the most successful spin-offs right now is in the Kenya Country Office, where the uh graduates of this program set up their own agency, if you want. And now they they kind of came together, they formed their own consortium, and they do all sorts of services for small, I would say, micro, micro SMEs in Kenya, like your kind of weekend flyer for the grocer around the store or so now. But it's enough for them to not be dependent on assistance. And I think that was really the goal. It was a uh a program that we that ran its course, and I think now it's also a different situation in terms of the type of operations that we have, and it formed the basis for a lot of learning, which is another core component of innovation, and I think one of the areas where we need to pay quite a bit of attention on and make sure that we're leveraging the learnings that come out of uh of some of the projects that we support.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

Yeah, that's really, really interesting. And you know, it's also kind of important to highlight that not everything in terms of the innovation is necessarily something high-tech, but those that actually are making positive change, impactful change, you know, through different systems, through people. Your organization operates, and you've kind of touched on it already in the during this chat, operating in some of the most complex and volatile contexts around the globe. How do you and your team adapt your approach to innovation, especially right now when you know the geopolitical situation is shifting so rapidly?

SPEAKER_02 27:52

When we first chatted about me joining this podcast and talked about this question, of course, I had a different answer in mind. And I think now, for me as a Lebanese, the last 10 days have been a different situation. So I think it's important for innovators that work in the impact sector and specifically also innovators that work in or for high conflict and volatile setups to first kind of take a deep breath and acknowledge that innovation is not a silver bullet. For the case of WFP, of course, hunger is a political, economic, and social issue as much as it is a technical issue. So innovation really can't replace political will and it cannot make leaders make other different decisions. It can unlock new pathways and challenge assumptions and help systems adapt faster when crises unfold, but doesn't necessarily stop crisis from happening. And it's very important as an innovator to focus on your area of control. And that's especially when you're balancing also your own personal mental health. I think a lot of the innovators that I have met come to this business also with a lot of heart. They obviously join this, especially in the impact space. So kind of innovation within the impact space, you come at it with this commitment to change because you're an innovator, and then you're doing it in the impact space, so with a real understanding of world issues. So sometimes that does come at a high personal cost in terms of mental health and empathy that you you feel sometimes derails your thinking. And that's a real syndrome that we see, kind of burnout and these kinds of things are really important to acknowledge and to observe and make sure that we have safety within teams, within leadership frameworks internally to be able to have spaces where people can come and talk about it personally and mentally, and also that you have systems or or or rituals or protocols in place to protect people that need protection in terms of giving them time to process if they are personally affected by certain situations. As a business, however, I think, or as an offering in general, so more as an organization, not at the personal level, I think it's important to design, and what we have been able to do is to really design different offerings for different situations. So we're definitely not going to go to one of our operations that are in crisis and offer them like this long-term, four-year program on a topic that is priority X for them. We're gonna have to go to them with solutions that are ready to deploy, that are solving the exact problems that they are having. And that requires us to have a finger on the pulse all the time about, you know, what are the problems that our operations are having, what are the solutions that we have in our pipeline, how can these be kind of modified? And that's an ongoing work that we have across the organization, not only at WF and not only in our innovation team. We have an entire team that focuses on anticipatory action and trying to really, and it's like complex analytical work, really. It's not necessarily like a, I don't want to make it sound like an easy step. It's like a really complicated area of our work and with a lot of the different things that come into play. And that allows WFP to put forward uh dashboards and recommendations specifically for our emergency operations and give them options of responses. And this is where we see a lot of promises in innovation to help us make those decisions faster, to ensure we have an understanding of the cost, et cetera. And then you have your more stable, more kind of protracted kind of situations where you can then go in with a more sort of slow cycle of innovation and where you can also try and think about more longer-term interventions that can yield results in further down the line and not necessarily immediately, because those are still worthwhile to pursue and they are the ones that help us uh reduce needs over a long period of time rather than continue to all the time respond to immediate and emerging needs. So I think that tension is a real one. It's one that we are grappling with every day. And I think it's important that you have kind of a personal strategy to protect yourself if you feel affected, and then more of a business strategy and different offerings for your organization so that you can respond with adaptability. And I think that's a core value for innovation in general, and one that I've of course touched on earlier before. And we see that coming over and over in terms of like uh as a core need and a core offering of innovation at WFP, but also across a lot of uh sister agencies that kind of like UNICEF and others that also work in similar environments.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Thank you for that. So, yeah, like you mentioned, there's often this tension, right, between the urgency of a humanitarian crisis or any, you know, humanitarian crises all around the world and the slower, more iterative nature of innovation and those longer-term interventions, like you said. So, how do you personally hold that tension in a way that allows your bold ideas to take root?

SPEAKER_02 33:21

I touched on this briefly before. I think that tension is essential. I really think that the best innovation comes from need and it comes from really listening to, as a personal innovator, it comes from listening to what's that problem that's bugging you and trying to solve it. Because, you know, all good innovation is personal in its sense where you have you need that personal drive and that personal connection to the problem in order for you to solve it. So I think in that space of fast and slow, in terms of like urgent tensions and the iterative nature of innovation, I think this is where we see a lot of good ideas coming. I have to say, I think in the world of the UN, the innovation team, or the fastest innovation, we're the fastest team. So I think it's also relative. I think sometimes it has been my experience that there is that speed to innovation that is, so I think it depends on what we benchmark innovation against. I think sometimes we're within a world of uh the world of the UN, an innovation, an accelerated path on innovation. So kind of when we take some of our programs and projects through an acceleration program, they go from kind of proof of concept or like an early stage innovation to a scale-up within, I don't know, 15 months or which is a really fast kind of fast timeline for the UN. So for our sector. So I think this is important to also acknowledge and make sure that we're setting the right expectations for that. But I think, as I mentioned earlier, I think that adaptability of innovation and the innovation mindset from a process perspective is quite essential. And what we've seen is like having a space where innovation can take hold and innovators can be protected, quote unquote, from the urgency of their day-to-day work. If, of course, the operations allow them and they're released into an acceleration program. I think that that's a really worthwhile avenue because then they dedicate some time to just focus on the problem and try to iterate around different solutions and then set that. So I think it's not necessarily the different in speed, as much as it's creating more of a safe space, not a safe space, as much as an independent space. So kind of a secluded space where you're not really focusing on your day-to-day operations, but focusing on really like taking care of that innovation. That was really also important in the early days of the accelerator when it started 10 years ago, coming into an organization where that methodology wasn't kind of day-to-day. It was very important to create that separate space. I see that a lot less these days. And so in this evolution of an innovation function within a large organization, I see that less and less. Now, innovation is like part of the process. It becomes part of, it's no longer like a topic on its own. It's kind of sprinkled across all the different avenues that the organization works on. We have innovations in every division, we have uh innovations that are supported by every, not supported, that are owned by every function in the organization. Whereas before, the accelerator also needed to own and protect certain innovations so that they would be viable for a while until the early adopters adopted them. And I think that that shift comes from a change in mindset and that can only happen over time when people kind of see the successes of innovation over time. So I think it's you can't really look at it in a vacuum, and it has to be considered in the context of an organization, whatever that is. And then within that, I think it's important to look at um gains over time and how that changes the methodology, and then you update the methodology accordingly.

SPEAKER_00 36:59

Um, just to kind of go back to, you know, we don't want to glaze over the fact that right now is it's been very intense. Difficult, intense period, right? And staying hopeful and motivated is something that many people are, you know, quietly struggling with right now. Like what practices or principles kind of help you and your team keep going and keep believing and doing the work that matters?

SPEAKER_02 37:28

I think obviously, first of all, it's important to give yourself space to feel all the things that you need to feel. And I think that's in this in today's world, sometimes I try to insist on that feeling because it's how else am I gonna know that I'm a human being and not a robot or an AI representation of myself out there in the world, right? So I think it's you know, just in in terms of like um, I tell my team all the time, like it's important to acknowledge that the sadness that you feel sometimes at the state of the world or the all of us, we have this these moments of paralysis. And I think it's you know, it's important to acknowledge that that's happening and kind of also acknowledge what works for you personally. So every person on their own. I think more as a leader of a team and also as a member of like the leadership team here at the Accelerator, I think it's very important for us more on like a mess or micro level to focus on who are we trying to support here? Who are the people that we're trying to serve, who are our clients? Like, why did we do this to begin with? I think like really focusing on the end game all the time and not get distracted. I and I don't want to use that, I don't want to glaze over the fact that we are having a series of really difficult crises on top of crisis, and the world is not able to recover before a new crisis starts. And those are not only political crises, but we we see the effects of climate change, we see the post-effects of COVID. And I think there's a lot of like real challenges that the world at the moment feels on fire. And so it's important to really acknowledge that it's you're not imagining it, it is real, right? But then really focusing on the law, on the end game, focusing on for me, I think personally, really trying to remember the people that I want to serve, the people that WFP is serving. I have their picture as my background, like my wallpaper background. There, I look at them after every email. So I think it's important to have your personal motivation that keeps you going, in making sure that you have a really good listening space, listening to your partners, listening to your customers, the people we serve in our case, and your team, if you're a leader, your peers, also if you're a leader, and kind of having your finger on the pulse of what's going on. We have to normalize rest and honesty and reflection and taking a day because you're not feeling well. I think that's okay. I think in this day and age, I think that's okay. I think we've gotten to levels of productivity where if you take half a day to just come back to yourself, it's not going to be the end of the world. I think for us also within WFP, we always try to make sure that we're being considerate of some of our other colleagues that are in much more difficult duty stations. So I at the moment, the unit that I work with, we're based in Germany. And I have colleagues and friends that are based in situ in duty stations that are quite difficult, like objectively, right? They don't see their families for weeks on end. They live in a compound confined, they can't go on a walk for like fresh air. So I think sometimes it's also important for us to kind of lift our head up outside of kind of the sand and really look at objectively where are other people now and what are they doing and what do they have to surmount? And kind of just make sure that you remember that. That doesn't necessarily mean that you personally are gonna feel better, but I think it's important to continue to have this sense of perspective and to continue to focus on the things that are working in your life. Finally, I think on a personal note, you know, I've said this before, you know, I come from Lebanon, my entire family, my in I live here with my family in Munich, but my extended family parents, siblings, my husband's parents and siblings, everyone's in Lebanon, my entire social circle, right? So in this day and age, you spend your time on your phone, looking at the news, on social media, trying to really like read what's going on all the time. And then you go back to your reality, and your reality is fine, like normal. Like there's nice weather, my kids are healthy, I'm healthy, my home is safe. And I think that that tension that people are having these days between their reality and the reality of the world is new. We didn't have this before. I think it's it's quite new in that. So having also breaks from social media, limiting your notifications to the most essential information or doing a time boxing, I know it sounds old school, but it's actually quite important to kind of really just regulate your nervous system and make sure that you're really focusing on what you can do on your realm of control. And I think that always helps. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:13

If you could give one piece of advice to someone trying to build a culture of innovation inside a large complex organization like yours, what would it be?

SPEAKER_02 42:22

I think it's important to be honest with the your incentives and the organization that you're building for. I see a lot of organizations at the moment that try to replicate what others are doing without necessarily taking a hard look at, you know, who are we building innovation culture, or even this applies also to innovations in general. Who are we building this for? What do they actually need? What resources do we have? What environment are we designing for? And so on and so forth. And kind of quite be honest about that and design for the organization, not kind of throw in a culture or kind of a framework at an organization and push it to adapt it. And I think I've seen a lot more uptake and engagement and adoption from by creating frameworks, whether those are cultural frameworks, transformation frameworks, innovation frameworks, together with the people that you're seeking to kind of bring bring along on this journey rather than kind of do it on your own and then send it to them. So I would say design with your organization, for your organization, not alone and kind of send it to them. I think that would be a really important one. And I can also just say quickly, like, I think it's important to commit to having a finger on the pulse of what's going on externally, I think specifically in the innovation space. So I think for organizations like mine, like the World Food Program, like the UN, that maybe not necessarily so tapped into the latest advances in innovation. I think having a commitment that no, we should bring that forward and we should expect uh excellence out of those services the same way we expect. Excellence out of the our own services that we consume as consumers, I think it's important to stay on that commitment and to make sure that we're bringing in excellence into these organizations because ultimately the people that we're designing for and the people that we're trying to innovate for, they deserve excellence as well. Yeah, they deserve long-term, really good, solid solutions that help us help them, you know, have a different outcome for their lives. And it's important to focus on that as well.

SPEAKER_01 44:27

Thank you so much. And finally, for anyone who wants to follow your work, learn more about the WWF and its innovation work, or find ways to support what you're building, where should they go? How can they best connect with you?

SPEAKER_02 44:39

I mean, there's many ways you can help. There's many ways you can connect. You can, of course, consult our websites both for innovation and for the WFP's work and just get informed about the work that we're doing and get engaged. We have uh an individual giving app called Share the Meal. So for all of you out there listening, you can share your meal. It takes less than a dollar to feed one person for a day. I highly encourage you to donate and to get engaged. And if you're a business, uh, if you're an organization, if you're a foundation, also reach out. We have different ways we can work together, different partnership models, and kind of come together to solve important challenges together. And I, of course, reaching us through the website is the best way, or on LinkedIn or others.

SPEAKER_00 45:25

Amazing. We'll be sure to put those links in the episode description so that everyone can learn more, connect with you, and also support the important work that your team are doing. Sancha, thank you so much again for joining us. We really appreciate you sharing your insights with us and all the work that you and your team are doing. Well done, and please keep it up. And that's a wrap on this episode of the Innovation Brief.

SPEAKER_01 45:50

If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to Innovation Brief and leave us a review. It helps other innovation leaders and curious minds discover the show. We'll be back next time with another inspiring conversation. This has been the Innovation Brief. I'm Stephanie Shahad.

SPEAKER_00 46:05

And I'm Gabi Hernandez. Thanks for listening.