Launchpad is a corporate accelerator that I launched and run to find solutions to climate change technology challenges in developing countries.
Help World Bank teams build and launch programs that support climate technology entrepreneurship
Founder and head
6 climate innovation programs designed and launched
Launchpad is a program that I built to empower competitively selected World Bank staff to create innovative programs that spur innovation to tackle climate change in sectors like clean energy, sustainable agriculture and waste management. Launchpad brings together cohorts of highly qualified World Bank teams from a variety of sectors and countries to build a next generation of climate innovation centers. By providing teams with design-based professional development, funding, and staff support, Launchpad aims to equip them with the structure, environment and skills they need to create and launch new program models and get them adopted by stakeholders.
Unlike challenges that ask entrants to provide solutions as part of their selection, we asked our teams to come ready with a market challenge – a question, not an answer. We built in the space and time for staff to look at their problem from every angle to ensure that no possible opportunity is overlooked, and our laboratory-like approach gives teams the opportunity to test and refine their projects at a comparatively limited cost before implementation.
Our coaching takes a distinctly cross-disciplinary approach, providing staff with skills they’re unlikely to come across in their ordinary working environment. We’re focusing heavily on design principles and stakeholder engagement, and looking at the ways those skills interact with the more traditional Bank focus on issues like political risk and economic trends.
Over 50 teams applied for two Launchpad cohorts. Teams were evaluated based on their commitment, usage of stakeholder-driven approaches, and ability to leverage resources to develop sustainable CICs. Launchpad adopts a rigorous stage-gate process, whereby teams showing the most progress per milestone are provided with increasing level of financial and technical support over two years to develop their project.
At the core of Launchpad services is capacitating teams to use design thinking methodology to discover and empathize stakeholder problems, and develop solutions that are tailored to challenges and needs of specific local climate entrepreneurship ecosystem. Each team is paired with a design coach to guide them through the problem and solution process. A designated Launchpad workshop is organized for each cohort periodically to build team goals and skills and maintain structure and momentum in the innovation process. Launchpad management team also deploys service offerings called “Brain Trust” and “Analytics” that expand teams’ knowledge base on climate, innovation and entrepreneurship by leveraging intelligence of internal and external experts and researchers.
Launchpad was designed with an integrated learning system that helped capture lessons along the way and adjust the program’s processes and team along the way. The learning system was built around testing a series of hypotheses on how Launchpad could generate results and impact. The learning system tests and refines these hypotheses by systematically collecting qualitative and quantitative data from Launchpad teams, management team members, and other stakeholders.
In some cases, major pivots were required. For example, mentors were initially drawn from a pool of retired World Bank officials. While their rolodexes proved useful for some teams, Launchpad faced challenges in calibrating expectations between mentors and teams. The mentors were later dropped. Another lesson was the amount of design support that was required. We originally assumed that teams would take concepts they learned in the workshops, and results from their workshops, and apply them in their research and design processes. We soon learned that teams felt intimidated to try the new approaches when they left the safety of the lab. We then had to increase the coaching support and added support to the teams in the field.
Another lessons picked up by the learning system were that the design thinking process led to better stakeholder engagement than business-as-usual methods. This can be attributed to a process that helped teams be solution-agnostic, explore a wide range of problems and solutions and validate their assumptions with stakeholders. For example, the Egypt Launchpad team engaged clean technology industry experts, entrepreneurs, and other ecosystem players through 74 engagements over 200 hours, and contemplating over 40 solutions.
One more lesson was the high value that the teams placed on the specialized knowledge offered by Launchpad’s network of experts. While the expert’s interventions were all generally short and targeted they allowed teams to respond to questions outside of their fields of expertise in a timely manner. The multi-dimensional problem – addressing climate change through business solutions, supporting entrepreneurs, and scaling private sector solutions- requires extensive deep knowledge of several topics and cross-disciplinary support that no single team could acquire.
Launchpad has had intentional outcome and spillover effects. The intentional outcome was the launch of climate innovation centers in 4 countries (Brazil, Mauritania, Nigeria and Bangladesh) with 2 more in the making. The Launchpad process helped the climate innovation centers adopt business models that are unique to the climate technology-related problems they face and the local context. As a result each center is very different from the other. In Brazil, it’s a partnership between different organizations that have pooled their resources to help small farms benefit from climate smart technologies that they typically have no way to access. In Nigeria, the CIC is run out of a university’s business school and aims to help the off-grid solar sector take-off by helping entrepreneurial firms spinout innovative business models. In Egypt, the CIC-in-the making has taken the form of a novel type of incubator that incubates not single firms but entire value chains.
Some unanticipated outcomes of Launchpad have been to shape the World Bank’s innovation culture. Through Launchpad, 16 World Bank teams have gone through a structured innovation process with coaching, training, facilitation and feedback from their peers. Most of the participants were exposed for the very first time to design thinking. Launchpad was well received within the World Bank and two other programs have aimed to replicate. The mainstreaming of Launchpad is now under consideration by the World Bank’s President’s office.