WBI's New Strategy

Sanjay Pradhan became WBI’s Vice President in October 2008, and with tremendous vision and support from Senior Management, ushered in a renewal strategy (pdf 1,361kb) that drew from wide-ranging consultations across the World Bank Group, IMF and with government officials, partner institutions, civil society organizations, and donors from 14 countries across all regions. 

A Vision Supported by the Right Tools

Given the dimensions of the task, this new vision implies moving WBI’s capacity building agenda from a ‘retail’ to a more ‘wholesale’ model through partnerships and technology. It also means a forward-looking focus on a few key cross-cutting development issues that build on successful approaches while leaving behind low-impact and one-off activities. WBI’s renewal strategy also recognizes that systematic means to integrate innovative, cutting-edge development solutions into capacity building efforts need to be enhanced and new mechanisms forged. 

‘We are strengthening four business lines,” says Akihiko Nishio, WBI’s Operations Director. “Structured learning, knowledge exchanges, leadership and change management, and practitioner innovations.”

Structured learning includes courses, seminars, and conferences. Knowledge exchanges are just-in-time practitioner dialogues, for example, debates on frontier development issues, or South-South learning through networks or communities of practice. “Innovations will be promoted through platforms like the Development Marketplace, as well as other models aimed at incubating creative solutions to development challenges,” Nishio said.”

“WBI’s new Innovation Practice reflects a more focused effort to catalyze solutions to the most pressing challenges developing countries face today,” Nishio said. “The aim of its first two years is to design and pilot in the areas of governance and fragile states a platform of new tools that are capable of scanning for innovations on the ground, disseminating these through fairs and on-line tools, incubating and scaling up innovation and, where gaps exist, catalyzing new innovation.”  

Scaling up through Partners

By adopting a wholesale approach, WBI aims to create a lasting impact, as local partner institutions can best adapt global development knowledge to accommodate local realities. But it’s an ambitious goal and implies forging stronger partnerships within the Bank and with leading academic, public, and private sector partners, think tanks, country and regional capacity-building institutions, peer networks, and bilateral and multilateral donors.

Gudrun Kochendorfer-Lucius, WBI’s new Director for Capacity Development and Partnerships: says “Working alone, it would be impossible for us to make a dent in global capacity needs,” she says. “But now there are many solid learning organizations and technologies that can take our programs to scale.”

Many partners are already world-class and WBI plans to support them by providing first-rate content in the form of curricula on key topics such as public-private partnerships or urban management. Right now WBI works with Harvard, MIT, Wharton in developing courses and learning materials.

“Some local institutes may need to build their own capacities to build capacity,” says Kochendorfer-Lucius. “We will work with them too, for example, through cutting-edge learning technologies—connecting them with leading institutes in different regions and with high-quality content.”

Connecting Knowledge and Learning

More and more, developing countries are supporting each other with knowledge, technical assistance, and innovative approaches. Officials are looking to their counterparts in the South for the expertise that is born of experience--for practical solutions that work. Responding to this demand, WBI is setting out to become a “global connector of capacity development” connecting practitioners in the South and creating knowledge-exchange activities such as study tours and multicountry dialogues. WBI’s model of capacity development aims to empower practitioners to customize their policy and institutional reforms where knowledge, learning, and innovation are shared in the service of operations

“We found that many of our clients wanted to learn from the people who had tacit knowledge based on personal experience, especially in times of crisis,” said Bruno Laporte, WBI’s Director for Knowledge and Learning. “They place a premium on the timely exchange of ideas and solutions with experienced policymakers and professionals.”  For WBI, this means becoming a broker of knowledge and learning: connecting demand and supply through country and regional capacity development centers and peer networks.

When the global economic crisis struck in 2008, WBI organized a number of just-in-time global dialogues through the GDLN, connecting policymakers from different countries, all of whom were struggling to come up with effective policy responses to similar problems. Participants discussed subnational financing, subnational government programs, the macroeconomic sector, the financial sector, and the effects of the crisis on the poorest.

Fostering Innovation: Development Marketplace and Beyond

The Innovation Practice aims to be this agile and nimble connector that works with both internal and external partners to mobilize and facilitate innovation, both across the Bank and globally. WBI is creating and Innovation Platform of tools that collectively would systematically encourage innovation and enhance the pace at which new ideas move through different stages of the innovation lifecycle. Although these tools will first be piloted by WBI, the aim is to make these tools directly accessible to the development community donors worldwide.

As a first step, WBI is creating an Innovation Radar tool to scan for innovations at early-stage experimentation and identify gaps and unmet needs, where greater innovation and experimentation is critically needed both within the Bank and in the broader development community.   For any development challenge the Radar addresses, outputs will include a more refined framing innovation needs, greater definition of the parameters and attributes of potential solutions, and a stronger focus to the future experimentation of the field – a role that is largely unfilled at the moment. These outputs would feed into the development of other parts on the Innovation Platform, including the design and scope of DM competitions to support early-stage testing of new ideas, Innovation Fairs and on-line mechanisms to that pool expertise and tacit knowledge of cutting-edge development solutions into “wiki capital” and broadcast this transformational knowledge to the developing community. 

 In addition to this broad role of identifying, supporting and broadcasting innovative solutions, WBI is developing and will pilot a few mechanisms to enable more rapid scale-up and replication of proven innovations into Bank operations and mainstreaming these solutions into the development agenda more broadly. 

Focusing on the Right Themes and Audiences

Since 1955, WBI (formerly the Economic Development Institute (EDI)) has been the Bank’s main provider of learning activities for its country partners, delivering training courses, seminars, and workshops to several generations of government officials. In recent years the number of activities and range of themes had escalated to unsustainable levels leading to a decline in quality and results. The task now facing WBI management is strategic selectivity and focus on topics that best support WBI’s country clients and the Bank’s corporate priorities.

Randi Ryterman recently joined WBI as Director of Governance and Innovation: “During our consultation, virtually all clients wanted activities on topics that cut across sectors,” she said. “Governance and accountability in the extractive industries, procurement, and in health systems are all high on countries’ capacity development agendas.”

Country demand and corporate priorities converged on four main topics: fragile and conflict-affected states; the global economic crisis; governance; and climate change. These will be key themes for WBI, along with courses on health systems, public-private partnerships in infrastructure, and sustainable urban development.

WBI will continue to serve its traditional public sector audiences, as well as non-state actors such as parliamentarians, media, civil society and youth, who participate in and exercise oversight of public processes. Client consultations once again highlighted the Institute’s connector role in bringing multiple stakeholders together to build mutual understanding, strengthen social accountability, and forge consensus around reforms.

“This is a huge opportunity for WBI to bring its long experience to bear on current development issue,” Pradhan said. “Demand is huge, expectations are high, and now implementation is key.”