Thanks, Jack, for the introduction, and for your partnership and continuing leadership of ACVFA. 

 

On behalf of Acting Administrator Lenhardt, I would like to thank all the members of ACVFA for their guidance and support year-round, which is truly critical to USAID’s success. 

 

I also want to thank all of you for being here today. Your engagement is critical as well, as everything we do at USAID is done on behalf of the American people. 

 

And this is an especially important time to be engaged. As Jack noted, 2015 has been a big year for the development community. That’s true in terms of challenges – you only have to have read a newspaper in the past year to know what challenges I’m talking about. Ebola. Syria. Yemen. El Niño. The list goes on.

 

But it is also true in terms of opportunity. At the end of September, world leaders came together at the UN General Assembly to adopt new global goals that will guide our work for the next 15 years, ranging from saving lives during childbirth to promoting gender equality to ending extreme poverty. And next month, I’ll head to Paris where President Obama and other world leaders will come together around a global framework for addressing climate change. 

 

Our goals are ambitious, and necessarily so. After all, our goals must be as ambitious as the challenges we face are daunting. That means we have to go beyond business as usual. And that’s where science, technology, innovation, and partnership come in. 

 

We have to develop meaningful and productive partnerships with businesses, universities, NGOs, and more to share risk, and enhance and sustain our efforts for years to come. We need to let evidence guide us – doubling down when something works and changing course when it doesn’t. And we need the kind of game-changing innovations that help countries leapfrog major development challenges.

 

But to do all that effectively, we first have to build a culture at USAID that does not just allow for innovation, but actually promotes and encourages it. We have to challenge ourselves to think differently. And, beyond our Agency, we need to show the entire international community how effective these new approaches can be.

 

That’s why I – along with all of USAID’s leadership – am so excited about the incredible work the U.S. Global Development Lab has been doing since it was established last year. 

 

Through competitions and challenges like Development Innovation Ventures or the Grand Challenges for Development, we are opening the doors to development and sourcing groundbreaking ideas from new people and new places. 

 

Last month the Lab awarded more than $14 million in new grants through the Development Innovation Ventures program. These grants went to a wide range of people and organizations – many of whom have never worked with USAID before – to test new solutions in developing countries, from an earthquake early warning system in Mexico to a new method to identify fake medicines in Kenya. 

 

All together, the Lab has used this year-round competition to invest in more than 360 solutions to food security, health, climate change, and economic growth challenges that are working to improve and save lives all over the world. And, to ensure we are only supporting the solutions that work, the program uses a tiered model, providing multiple rounds of funding as evidence accumulates and scaling progresses. In addition to protecting precious taxpayer dollars, this approach is helping hundreds of social entrepreneurs and innovators refine their business models and become investment-ready.

 

That’s just one of the ways the Lab is pushing USAID forward, helping to build a culture of smart risk-taking that is so essential to an innovative enterprise but often at odds with the ways of bureaucracy.

 

As we move forward, the Lab – and the entire Agency – will continue to look for ways to institutionalize a culture of innovation. You will get a chance to hear more about those ways – and the associated opportunities and challenges – from our excellent panelists this afternoon.

 

You can also read more about them in the Lab Advisory Group's report. If you didn't pick one up on your way in, be sure to grab it on the way out. The Advisory Group, established under ACVFA, has been essential to the Lab’s progress so far, and has put forth a few key recommendations to guide its continued evolution. I want to thank all of the Group’s members for their hard work, guidance, and support over the past year and a half. I know I speak for everyone at USAID when I say we are excited to continue to work with them to drive this important work forward. 

 

I know you are all eager to get to the discussions, where you’ll hear from some of the Advisory Group members directly. So the last thing I’ll say is this: in building an innovation enterprise, it is just as important to talk about failure as it is about success. 

 

We have not always gotten it right, and we won’t in the future either. But only by asking the right questions and sharing lessons learned from those failures can we evolve into an organization that is fully capable of harnessing the immense power of science, technology, innovation, and partnership to end extreme poverty and promote resilient, democratic societies everywhere.

 

Thank you again for being here, and for your continued engagement with USAID.

 

For remarks from the full event, please refer here: ACVFA Public Meeting Transcript