Our Story

How did we get here?

When the Millennium Development Goals came to a close in 2015, global action on the world’s challenges was still falling far short of the pace and scale needed to end poverty, promote peace, and secure a more prosperous and equitable planet for all. 

With the even more ambitious Sustainable Development Goals coming into play later that year, it was clear that a business as usual approach would not suffice in advancing transformative change, and many development agencies took steps to create and formalize dedicated teams and funding streams exploring how innovation could be applied to achieve better results. 

At that time, only a limited set of tools and frameworks had been established to help agencies understand how to support and use innovation in a development context. In response, the Rockefeller Foundation approached Results for Development (R4D) to explore the potential of a knowledge exchange platform for leading development agencies to discuss and share learnings from their innovation strategy and programming.

This led to the senior innovation leaders and Chief Innovation Officers from 10 of the world’s biggest development agencies coming together in February 2015 to launch an informal ‘Funder’s Innovation Group’, facilitated by a small Secretariat team at R4D. These ‘Founding Members’ were:

  • Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade (DFAT)

  • Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

  • Global Affairs Canada (GAC)

  • Grand Challenges Canada (GCC)

  • Rockefeller Foundation

  • Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)

  • UK Department for International Development (DFID)

  • United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)

  • United States Agency for International Development (USAID)

  • World Bank Group

The Need

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The founding members of the Funder’s Innovation Group moved quickly to co-create a shared ‘Mission & Purpose” paper in which they articulated their shared objective to ‘actively promote and effectively advance innovation as a means to help achieve sustainable development and the 2030 Agenda, by: 

  • Sharing knowledge, experiences and insights

  • Identifying and addressing gaps in the innovation ecosystem

  • Collaborating to develop public goods that support innovation, including pooling resources as appropriate

In the process, they adopted the name International Development Innovation Alliance, and IDIA was born. 

Central to the group’s early priorities was the objective to establish a common understanding of innovation that they could then collectively advance to mobilize support from the wider global development community. This led to the launch of IDIA’s 2015 “Call for Innovation in International Development” at the Third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 

IDIA members then set about establishing a series of Working Groups and Taskforces, inviting global and local experts to help them address key knowledge gaps and co-create shared tools and frameworks to enhance the efficacy of development innovation practice around the world.

These resources, shared as global public goods, included shared resources for Scaling Innovation, Measuring the Impact of Innovation, Bridging Gender Equality & Innovation, Exploring Systems Innovation, Frontier Technologies, Strengthening Innovation Ecosystems, and many more.


Through these products, which have been adopted or adapted by diverse actors across the global development community – including governments, private sector, civil society and academia – IDIA attracted additional members and grew to become one of the world’s foremost communities for advancing innovation strategy and practice.

Early Strategy and Outputs

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Impact Highlights 2015-25

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Setting the Agenda for Global Innovation Investments

In 2018, IDIA worked with the G7 organizing committee to create The Whistler Principles to Accelerate Innovation for Development Impact, providing the world’s seven most advanced economies with a framework that was subsequently adopted by all G7 Ministers for humanitarian and development assistance. This was a milestone moment for G7 countries in committing to driving change in their own organizations and enabling new partnerships to support pathbreaking solutions that challenge traditional approaches. 

Building the next generation of innovation leadership

Since 2018, IDIA has packaged and disseminated its learning through an immersive training course for innovation actors across the world. Delivered in partnership with the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and a range of global experts, practitioners and thought leaders, the IDIA Training on Managing Innovation for Impact has so far created a community of over 160 innovation experts who are leading the application of IDIA principles, tools and frameworks in more than 30 countries around the world.

Pioneering Innovation Ecosystem Investment

In 2020, IDIA worked with a range of actors across Africa to co-create the IDIA Framework for Strengthening Innovation Ecosystems, a groundbreaking model that emphasizes the importance of funders moving beyond financing individual solutions to support the wider set of actors, resources, policies and partnerships that are crucial to the efficient production and scale-up of innovation. Following its publication in 2021, this framework was used by the UK Government Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) as the basis for its first ever innovation ecosystem strengthening initiative, the Research & Innovation Systems Africa (RISA) Fund, implemented in Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. 

Accelerating Public Sector Scaling of Innovation

During the COVID-19 pandemic, IDIA members reflected on how few innovations were scaling through the public sector, and worked with governments in East Africa to co-create a locally-facilitated model to accelerate the sourcing, integration and scale-up of innovations in public health systems. The model, known colloquially as the “Mountain Model”, is now being used by 16 county governments in Kenya, as well as the national Ministries of Health in Ethiopia and Tanzania with support from Grand Challenges Canada, the Gates Foundation and the Global Financing Facility. The World Health Organization has also leveraged the Mountain Model, applying it as the basis for its first ever World Health Innovation Forum and ‘Global Call to Action for Public Sector Scaling’.

A New Decade of Collective Impact

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By the end of 2025, the IDIA membership had grown to encompass a diverse variety of actors, reaching far beyond the development agencies who initially established the platform. 

Along the way, IDIA had created a community of Global Innovation Advisors across Africa, Asia and Latin America, integrating their contextual and thematic expertise into its governance structure to ensure that Global South priorities and realities are mainstreamed in its strategy and decision making.

IDIA had also established the Million Lives Collective (MLC) – a unique community of innovators and entrepreneurs whose solutions have already reached significant levels of scale, and whose experience and insights could guide IDIA in generating greater, exponential levels of impact. 

A unique cohort of Government Innovation Fellows had also formed, bringing together Ministerial Advisors and departmental leads with innovation mandates from multiple countries and continents to support South-South learning and collaboration. This community has since been complemented by IDIA’s Partner Networks - periphery alliances and communities with similar innovation and impact objectives with whom IDIA collaborates to advance mutually beneficial objectives. 

Finally, IDIA now included all of the alumni from 30+ countries who had completed the IDIA Managing Innovation for Impact Global Training Programme, and who continued to support each other in advancing innovation leadership within their institutions and wider ecosystems.

The diverse Ecosystem of actors that IDIA had mobilised over its first decade was officially launched in December 2025 at the inaugural IDIA Global Summit, where leaders from each of these communities gathered for three days in Nairobi to forge collective pathways for optimizing the value, resources and expertise that now existed under the global IDIA umbrella. 

Invigorated by the determination and potential impact of its Ecosystem members, IDIA is now entering its next decade with an open invitation for other like-minded, committed agencies, organizations and individuals to join us on our evolving journey to advance innovation for sustainable development.