Jenny Wilde – Embrace Complexity in Innovation

BIO: Jenny Wilde has over 15 years of hands-on experience as a senior manager in humanitarian response and an innovation expert. STORY: Jenny saw the need to set up an Innovation Fund to support innovative ideas to make their emergency response easier and more effective. Unfortunately, company politics took over, and the fund was scrapped off. LEARNING: Embrace complexity when dealing with innovation.   “Different problems in different innovations require different tools and methodologies.”Jenny Wilde  Guest profilehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-wilde-bbb05867/ (Jenny Wilde) has over 15 years of hands-on experience as a senior manager in humanitarian response and an innovation expert. She has supported innovative organizations and initiatives in countries as diverse as the USA, South Sudan, and Nepal. She has pioneered initiatives that break from conventional innovation models and enable global scale. Worst investment everJenny was the operational director of emergency response in the Philippines, responding to a large typhoon, Typhoon Haiyan, that had ripped through the country’s center. Everyone was trying to make decisions and get stuff out of the door without a lot of deeper thinking. Jenny thought that her organization needed an innovation fund that would help bring to light any innovative ideas that would make their work easier. So they got the money and a team together and set up the fund. Within no time, the fund got political, with everyone wanting to take credit for the idea while, in reality, doing nothing. It was stressful for Jenny because she was heavily invested in the idea. Essentially the Innovation Fund got scrapped because of politics. Lessons learnedYou’ve got to simplify the problem. Make it as simple as possible, and then work with it. When you’re innovating around complex problems, you need to step back and take in all that complexity to do transformational shifts. Andrew’s takeawaysEmbrace complexity because there will be problems that you need to solve that are v