Innovation isn’t a department: How UNSSC helped UNFPA teams turn strategy into practice

It is often said that survival belongs not to the strongest, but to those most able to adapt.

For the United Nations system, that idea is no longer abstract. The world is moving faster than many institutions were designed to move. Demographic shifts, digital disruption, climate pressure, shrinking resources and increasingly complex development challenges are testing whether organizations can keep learning, adjusting and delivering in new ways. 

This is the challenge UNFPA set out to address through its Innovation Strategy 2030. The rationale for it was to avoid treating innovation as a side project, a lab, or a specialist function, but to embed it into the way colleagues think, plan and solve problems across the organization.

UNSSC’s role was to help turn that ambition into practice.

Through a tailored seven-week programme, co-designed with UNFPA, UNSSC helped colleagues connect the strategy to their daily work: from human-centred design, scaling and financing to storytelling, peer coaching and operational planning. The aim was to bring the innovation strategy to life, and to help teams move innovation from paper into workplans, processes, budgets and everyday decisions.

For Manisha Anand, Programme Associate at UNFPA’s Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office, that shift was immediate. Before the programme, innovation could feel like something reserved for “new initiatives or specialized teams.” Strategy could feel distant from the realities of finance, procurement and implementing partners.

After the programme, innovation became something else: a way to pause, question routine processes and ask whether work could be done more clearly, quickly or effectively.

“Innovation doesn’t always mean creating something completely new,” she reflected. Sometimes, it is about looking at existing systems and asking: how could this work better?

The challenge: making innovation everyone’s work

UNFPA’s Innovation Strategy 2030 set out a clear ambition to embed innovation across the organization. But like many strategies, the challenge was not only defining the vision. It was helping colleagues translate it into daily decisions, workplans and operational practice.

For Manisha Anand, Programme Associate in UNFPA’s Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office, the word “strategy” could feel distant from everyday work. Her role involves finance, procurement, implementing partners and administrative processes: areas shaped by rules, compliance and established procedures.

Sydney Hushi, who supports innovation mainstreaming and digital transformation in the same regional office, saw the same pattern. Innovation, he noted, is often misunderstood as software, digital tools or programme pilots. “Nobody really thinks about operations,” he said.

The opportunity was clear: if innovation could be translated into the language of everyday work, it could become something colleagues across UNFPA could use, not something reserved for specialists.

Why it matters

For UNFPA, this is where innovation begins to move from ambition to practice.

When colleagues start asking how existing processes can work better, innovation becomes part of delivery. When recurring operational issues are addressed at the root, teams spend less time responding to the same problems. When staff outside formal innovation roles feel confident to contribute ideas, innovation becomes less dependent on a small group of specialists.

The signs of that shift are already visible. Colleagues are integrating innovation into workplans without prompting. They are approaching innovation teams for support. Some are allocating budgets for innovation activities, turning ideas into planned and resourced work.

This is the value of UNSSC’s support: helping UNFPA translate the Innovation Strategy 2030 into a practical, repeatable way of working.

The programme did not treat innovation as a department. It treated it as a capability that can be built across roles, offices and functions. It gave colleagues a shared language, practical tools and the confidence to ask better questions about their own work.

For Manisha, the lesson is simple: change does not always require a leap.

“One practical step at a time,” she said. “That’s all it takes to see the difference.”

That is how innovation moves from paper to practice: through colleagues who see that improving a process, questioning a default approach, or solving a recurring bottleneck is not separate from innovation.

It is innovation.