This was a capacity building project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation through Bridgespan Group, which provided targeted support to RAN’s Eastern Africa Resilience Innovation Lab (RIL) to enhance its approach to social innovation between 2015-2016. Partnering with Stanford University’s Change Labs and MIT’s D-Labs, the project aimed to embed a ‘mindset of scalability, feasibility, and viability’ within the lab’s innovation processes, moving beyond ideation to sustainable impact.
The capacity building employed a learning-by-doing approach, with Stanford and MIT experts working alongside RAN staff and innovators through several intensive workshops, coaching sessions, and collaborative project reviews. The training focused on three core areas: (1) human-centered design methodologies refined for East African contexts, emphasizing deep empathy with communities, iterative prototyping, and user feedback integration; (2) systems thinking approaches that helped innovators understand the broader ecosystems in which their solutions would operate, identifying leverage points for change and potential unintended consequences; (3) venture development frameworks adapted for social innovation, covering business model design, resource mobilization, partnership development, and impact measurement.
It also involved training in modular design principles that allowed for adaptation to different contexts, development of minimum viable products that could be tested and refined rapidly, and creation of implementation toolkits that would enable replication by others. The project also strengthened the lab’s own organizational capacity, developing processes for innovation portfolio management, mentor matching, progress tracking, and learning capture. Practical tools introduced included innovation canvases adapted for social ventures, scaling readiness assessment frameworks, and impact logic models that connected activities to outcomes. The capacity building extended beyond formal training to include ongoing mentorship relationships and access to global innovation networks, connecting RAN’s innovators with peers and experts worldwide.
