2023

Annual Report

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Foreword from the President of the Board

Harnessing Innovation in times of Polycrisis

Economic, health, environmental, social and geopolitical challenges converge and present unprecedented challenges. Can innovation unlock transformative solutions and help to navigate this complex web of adversity?

Innovative thinking, often spurred by necessity, allows us to challenge conventional norms and explore novel approaches to multifaceted problems. Technological advancements, for instance, enable rapid responses in healthcare, facilitating the development of vaccines and medical technologies crucial in managing global health crises. Beyond technology, innovation extends to reimagining business models, fostering community resilience, and devising sustainable strategies to mitigate environmental impacts.

The dynamic nature of polycrisis demands an adaptive mindset, and innovation provides the essential toolset for such agility. Organizations that embrace a culture of

innovation are better positioned to pivot and thrive amidst uncertainty. From agile startups to established enterprises, the capacity to innovate becomes a strategic advantage, allowing for the rapid development and deployment of solutions tailored to the evolving challenges.

Furthermore, collaboration and knowledge-sharing are inherent to the innovation process. In times of polycrisis, when challenges transcend borders and disciplines, a collaborative approach enhances the collective ability to tackle complex issues. And this is at the very core of the Geneva Innovation Movement.

By leveraging innovation, we create a blueprint for a more resilient, adaptive, and sustainable future.

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Message from the Managing Director

Never has the need for dialog been so clear as it is at the end of 2023. Geneva, the capital of dialog, is more than ever called upon to step up and use its platform as a voice for peace. Unfortunately, the lack of resources left many of Geneva’s organizations struggling when they are needed more than ever. It is precisely in moments of flux, in challenging times, that innovation becomes more than just an experiment, a nice to have. It is in precisely these difficult moments that innovation becomes an absolute must. Not just for survival and continuity. But for developing the key skills and narratives that will determine the future of our city and the organizations that call it home.

We saw the Geneva Innovation Movement grow its membership immensely in 2023, with this a desire to

move from collective intelligence towards collective action in developing clear cross-sectoral solutions.

And the Movement continues to channel the top innovation topics of its membership base and translate the latest research findings on these topics to provide a framework on how we can move ahead, as individuals, as organizations, and as the city convener of the world.

I am optimistic that 2024 will see us supported even further through key partnerships; that the city will rise up to support the flourish of novel initiatives and ideas coming from its groundswell.

Dr. Katherine Tatarinov

Managing Director of the Geneva Innovation Movement, Professor of Strategy at HEC Lausanne

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HISTORY

The Geneva Innovation Movement Association (GIM) was created out of a need identified by academic research, for a cross-sector platform that connects International Organizations, NGOs, and the private sector around the topic of managing innovation as a force for good.

While Geneva is recognized as the global center for mission-driven organizations who are tasked with solving the world’s biggest problems, these organizations’ progress on innovation suffered from a lack of communication and collaboration. These mission-driven organizations are increasingly adopting innovation strategies and initiatives to renew themselves and remain relevant in today's changing environment, but they often find it difficult to inspire new types of behavior and lack the structures to catalyze innovative ideas.

In 2020, a grassroots effort led by 16 individuals including several Professors, UN Directors and intrapreneurs formalized as a registered non-profit association called the Geneva Innovation

Movement (GIM). The vision is that all organizations need to

adopt novel managerial processes to embrace organizational innovation and make them more efficient and effective.

They believed that management practices can be learned to remedy and improve the situation. The GIM facilitates the platform and provides thought-leadership by pooling and curating the expertise of its members and collaborators.

Over the course of the last 3 years, the association proved its need in Geneva. It grew to nearly 100 individual members, of which 46% are from the UN, 23% from NGOs, 14% from Academia, and 16% from the Public and Private Sectors. It convened 28 events, from small, high-level knowledge sharing circles for five people to massive events for up to 200 people and conducted eleven trainings to provide managerial skills to senior leaders from the UN, INGOs and public sector organizations – so they can go back and transform both how their organizations work and innovate. In 2023 alone, GIM trained 290 people from 17 non-profit organizations.

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THANK YOU

We would like to thank all our members, founding members and partners for their collaboration, consultation, initiatives, ideas, and insights. You are the ones that make the Movement happen!

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Management, Board of Directors, and Advisory Board

The governance structure is a cross-sector board that spans significant Geneva-based institutions.

Board of directors

President

Thomas Neufing

Chief at the Center for Learning

and Multilingualism at UN Geneva

Advisory Board

Prof. Tina Ambos

Professor of International Management at the University of Geneva

Secretary

Susanna Swann

Chief Human Resources Officer

at Geneva Airport

Corinne Momal-Vanian

Executive Director of the Kofi Annan Foundation

Treasurer

Nan Buzard

Head of Innovation at ICRC

Michael Møller

Former Secretary General of UN Geneva

Management

Dr. Katherine Tatarinov

Managing Director

Iris Dieleman

Chief Operations & Finance Offier

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2023 In Brief

The focus of the Geneva Innovation Movement’s learning programs and events in 2023 was on linking innovation and transformation, digital skills, and AI. We partnered with renowned organizations such as UNIGE, INSEAD, CERN, EY and Swiss Cancer Support to widen our reach and impact.

The GIM achieves its mission through three pillars of activities:

Pillar I. Network Building: Facilitating across silos and

connecting people

We (co-)organized and participated in four intimate networking events, a place to plant seeds for creativity. On average, these events were attended by 26 of our members and invited guests.

Pillar II. Upskilling: Developing new perspectives and new skills for managers

We trained 290 people from 17 non-profit organizations in five facilitated training programs

Pillar III. Knowledge Translating: Creating and communicating insights

We organized three knowledge translating events, shared three research papers and four articles on the topics related to innovation as a force for good. All publications can be found on our Insights page.

In the middle of Spring, the GIM provided its members with the opportunity to meet each other and share their experiences during a networking event titled “Innovation is Blossoming” at the Maison Ariana in the heart of Geneva’s Varembé district.

After a beautiful summer, the GIM kickstarted the second half of the year by organizing a networking event under the name “Innovation in the Sun”, hosted at UN Port in Geneva where GIM members and invited guests had the opportunity to meet each other and share their knowledge and experiences in an informal setting. An opportunity to build a network of people using innovation as a force for good.

The Geneva Innovation Movement is a proud partner of Giga, a UNICEF and ITU partnership to connect every school in the world to the internet. We had the great pleasure to invite our members to the Giga Partners Day 2023 and to co-host the networking drinks that followed the expo-style Showcase of Giga’s open-source technology products.

In collaboration with Inner Development Goals and graciously hosted by our partner Swiss Cancer Support, we brought the network together for a fireside chat to reflect on leadership challenges when working on innovation in large organizations. Moderated by Elina Viitaniemi, conversation starters Katherine Milligan, Chris Burton and Mark Milton guided the discussion on conscious leadership and the elevation of tangible practices to developing collaboration and risk-taking as leaders.

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KEY

TAKEAWAYS

By being conscious of how we act as individuals we can further the internal transformation of our organizations to make them better prepared to develop solutions for the SDGs.

Reflection with...

Nan Buzard, Treasurer of the Board of the Geneva Innovation Movement, former Head of Innovation at ICRC

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We are all surrounded by constant innovation – perhaps most visibly in the form of technological advances. But how do we plan for innovation? Reflecting on my time as the head of innovation at ICRC, it is the element of anticipation that comes up again and again as the most essential, the most powerful, and also the most difficult. How do we decide where to invest the time, energy, and funds of public sector institutions to innovate for success? How do we know now what we will need in the future? How can we be sure that our planning and preparedness is future-informed?

Strategic foresight is an approach and methodology that offers two critical opportunities, especially for public sector institutions: a framework for the “funnel” of innovation ideas and the possibility of building collective understanding and even consensus around innovation decisions and investments. At the ICRC we began using it for simultaneously expanding and refining our innovation funnel. There were always lots of ideas - from experimenting with highly technical digital solutions to exploring new techniques in beekeeping for livelihood programs. By using strategic foresight methodologies, we could emphasize and privilege future considerations as part of any investment evaluation. Building staff capacity in foresight methodology also promoted more joined-up analysis and agreement on planning and investments. I was struck by the empowerment staff felt using the tools of this approach. Strategic foresight is not a crystal ball or a guarantee of successful innovations, but it is a rigorous and thought-provoking orientation to integrating future needs. As the Geneva Innovation Movement membership continues to expand, I believe we will find an increasing number of institutions that recognize the value of this approach, which can be applied to any sector and any problem. Public sector innovation can be informed by a collective sense of the future we imagine and desire.

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The embracing of digitalization not only by tech experts but across all levels of the organization requires collaboration between professional silos, especially when addressing complex problems in a fast-changing world. Seeking new ideas for how to address this issue, a cross-sectoral group from 7 organizations (UNOG, ITC, UNAIDS, UNIGE, Constructor University, Swiss Cancer Support and GIM) came together at CERN’s IdeaSquare to participate in a hands-on digital skills workshop, organized by the GIM in cooperation with CERN’s IdeaSquare.

The aim was to explore how to collaborate across professional silos in a digital world when addressing complex problems such as the

sustainable development goals (SDGs). The challenges start with the questions we ask, how we frame the problems, and how we pivot towards solutions. The workshop was run in teams comprised of one general manager and a technical colleague from the same organization. It was found that the hardest part in working together is to speak the same language, which can be chaotic at first – we need to question each other. Use of (simple) prototypes helps to communicate and find the right answer before moving to the next scale up phase. The workshop was facilitated by Markus Nordberg – Head of CERN’s IdeaSquare and Dina Longva Zimmermann – prototyping facilitator at CERN IdeaSquare.

The workshop Implementing Modern Agile Concepts consists of three modules and has been developed by the Geneva Innovation Movement in collaboration with UN Geneva’s NewWork Team and Roche. For the SDG Lab, the GIM facilitated a customized workshop on Agile Methods “From Tools to Roadmap for Implementation”. The workshop showed participants to understand how techniques can be applied in their organizational setting, and how to strategically conceptualize such a transformation to result in efficiency gains within the team and across teams. It focused in on the strategic requirements and challenges faced while transforming to Agile ways of working. Agile techniques can be adapted across different functions and regions, and the key role for leadership is in facilitating and supporting its scale to foster the creative environment required for innovation from the inside. The workshop was facilitated by Prof. Tina Ambos and Dr. Katherine Tatarinov.

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The GIM’s flagship cross-organizational online program for UN and INGO senior leaders, the Innovation Movement Training: Innovation as a Force for good in a Digital World, was offered in 2023 in collaboration with global consulting firm EY. 32 Participants from 12 different locations, representing 8 organizations (IFRC, ILO, IOM, ITU, UNAIDS, UNDP, UN Geneva, and WHO) learned to apply the opportunities that digital transformation has to offer, while correctly assessing the related risks. The participants engaged with other senior leaders in innovation and digital transformation work and are provided with processes and tools to lead teams through change. The facilitation of the training is in the hands of Dr. Katherine Tatarinov (UNIL), Prof. Tina Ambos (UNIGE), Prof. Phanish Puranam (INSEAD), Katherine Milligan (Collective Change Lab), and Ruth MacLachlin (WEF). They were assisted by guests speakers who are experts in the field. The training was co-created with the Chiefs of Learning and HR from UNHCR, ILO, UNOG and ITU, and its content is constantly updated to reflect the latest knowledge and current trends in innovation.

The GIM organized a series of three webinars exclusively for WTO staff on the topic of Innovation & Creativity in a Digital World to facilitate the intensified focus on innovation and creativity in the organization. The topics covered included “Demystifying AI and Digital Transformation”, “Cross-Sector Collaboration in Digital Ecosystems”, and “International Organizations in the Metaverse”. Guest speakers included Prof. Phanish Puranam – Professor of Strategy and Organization Design at INSEAD, Marija Novkovic – GIGA Programme Manager at UNICEF, Prof. Michael Jacobides – Professor of Strategy at London Business School, Christian Rouffaer – Head of the Virtual Reality unit at ICRC, and Tom Wambeke – Chief of Learning Innovation at ITCILO. Prof. Tina Ambos and Dr. Katherine Tatarinov facilitated the webinars, which were attended by a total of 196 people.

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The GIM organized two customized workshops for 40 selected WTO staff. The workshop Demystifying Digitalization: Digital Tools to Support the Creation of Reports was created to reveal the different use cases of digital technology and design the types of skills that may need to be acquired in the future, fully customized to the needs of WTO Staff. The workshop was offered twice. The facilitation was in the hands of Prof. Tina Ambos (UNIGE) and Prof. Markus Meierer (UNIGE), with a guest intervention from WEF’s Bryonie Guthrie.

Pillar III. Knowledge Translating

The GIM creates and communicates insights in innovation-related topics.

The GIM, CERN and UNIGE organized an event to jointly present the findings from the Digital Skills workshop that were reported in the white paper Digital Skills for a Changing World: Learning from Fundamental Physics how to Innovate for the SDGs. The event’s panel consisted of both participants to the workshop and authors of the white paper that was writte based on the findings and observations made during the workshop. Adriana de Oro and Muhammad Yakubu, both participants to the workshop, shared their practical experiences. The panel was completed by Markus Nordberg, Prof. Tina Ambos and moderator Dr. Katherine Tatarinov, the three authors of the white paper who analysed the threaths and opportunities of digital tools as observed during the workshop, and how organizations can learn from the methodologies used by physicists at CERN.

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KEY

TAKEAWAYS

The methodologies used by physics to advance science can be shared and

used broadly for complex digital innovation problems: the “translating” of tech knowledge

to non-technical people. By increasing communications, trust, and reducing our level of fear in engaging with technology we will build the trust that will enable fusion teams to come together. As both managers and technical staff, we must be clear on parameters of what the problems are and the instructions on how to solve them. In our prototype, the groups that built their detectors the fastest were the groups that asked questions!

Pillar III. Knowledge Translating

The GIM creates and communicates insights in innovation-related topics.

Collaboration is key at all stages of the innovation process, from ideation to scale, particularly for those organizations working on finding solutions to volatile societal challenges. One aspect of this collaboration is sparking collective intelligence, which holds the highest promise of innovative ideas and solutions to address grand challenges. The event Harnessing Cross-Sector Collective Intelligence, co-hosted by EY and the Geneva Innovation Movement, showcased the best practices of existing cross-sector collaborations and calls to harness our collective intelligence to transform our world.

The evening started with a cross-sectoral panel consisting of Chris Fabian - co-lead at Giga, UNICEF, Michael Møller, former Director General of UN Office at Geneva, Pascal Bijleveld – CEO at ATscale, the Global Partnership for Assistive Technology, Ramya Krishnaswamy – Head of ESG and Institutional Communities, Member of Executive Committee, World Economic Forum, and David Behrends – Head of Trading and Managing Partner at Sucafina, moderated by Julie Teigland – Area Managing Partner EMEIA at EY. After the panel discussion, the participants split into small cross-sectoral working groups to discuss the challenge: “What are the new solutions to accelerate the SDGs?” Participants were asked to visualize their proposales using Lego® and present their findings to the other groups at the end of the event.

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KEY

TAKEAWAYS

Five concrete suggestions were put forward:

1. Think in the future! Let go of the baggage and structures of today’s world and the present ways of working and thinking

2. Understand your organization’s capacity to act at scale or foster meaningful partnerships that contribute to the global agenda, e.g., the public sector can act as a de- risking mechanism for partners who are able to move faster

3. Treat all your projects as if they were open-source tech start-ups with business models and the potential to fail – challenging cultural bias

4. Develop organizational and personal skills and capabilities for partnership creation and trust-building – i.e., know when to set aside our egos and gain a deeper understanding of the contributions the other side can offer

5. Walk the talk and adjust measurement mechanisms and financial flows to support

a logic of collaboration and acceleration.

Pillar III. Knowledge Translating

The GIM creates and communicates insights in innovation-related topics.

The 2023 Innovation Debate, organized by the Geneva Innovation Movement and the Center for Innovation & Partnerships and co-hosted by INSEAD’s Hoffmann Global Institute for Business and Society, was the first in an annual series. Four high-level managers from public and private sector organizations debated the motion: “Innovative initiatives that originate in large organizations ought to be retained within the overall structure of the organization itself”.

Speaking for the motion were Cynthia Hansen (Innovation Foundation – The Adecco Group) and Massimo Gentile (Genève Airport). Speaking against the motion were Pradeep Kakkattil (HIEx – UNAIDS) and Susanne Emonet (Farmer Connect – Sucafina). Renowned experts on innovation Prof. Dr. Tina Ambos, Prof Dr. Felipe Monteiro (INSEAD), Prof. Dr. Gilbert Probst(UNIGE) and Dr. Katherine Tatarinov (UNIL) framed and moderated the discussion.

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Pillar III. Knowledge Translating

The GIM creates and communicates insights in innovation-related topics.

Fit for solving the grand challenges? From organization design choices to ecosystem solutions

This article discusses the implications of different organization designs for solving the Grand Challenges. We outline different organization design choices for solving the grand challenges and provide a categorization of how selected types of organizations are fit to respond to these based on organizational goals (social–profit), organizational scale (local–global), and organizational decision making (agile–bureaucratic).

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Pillar III. Knowledge Translating

The GIM creates and communicates insights in innovation-related topics.

Reflection with...

Prof. Dr. Tina Ambos, member of the Advisory Board of the Geneva Innovation Movement, Professor of International Management at UNIGE

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STAY CONNECTEd

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The Geneva Innovation Movement Association

Annual Report 2023

Editor: Iris Dieleman

Visual and design: Stacie Baek

© The Geneva Innovation Movement Association

Published by The Geneva Innovation Movement Association