Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, recognized the need to accelerate the implementation of Agenda 2030 and wished to expedite their own transformation towards becoming a more modern agency.
Client: Sida
We worked with: Innovation, Service design
Since the autumn of 2019, Antrop has been closely collaborating with Sida to provide innovation leadership and establish Sida Lab—a space for testing, learning, and developing new methods and approaches within the organization and with strategic partners. Sida, whose mission is to improve living conditions for people living in poverty and oppression, plays a crucial role in bringing together different actors, forging new partnerships, and creating conditions for change. However, the work has become increasingly complex amidst armed conflicts, climate change, and humanitarian crises, which are growing in scale and duration. Consequently, there is a pressing need for new methods to expedite the achievement of the goals outlined in Agenda 2030. Support is needed to create conditions for innovative solutions, innovation leadership, and an efficient process for experimentation, development, testing and learning.
Klas Waldenström, responsible for the initiative at Sida, explains the aim of the innovation lab.
– When we started Sida Lab, our intention was to help develop the organization, raise the level of innovation in daily operations, and provide space for employees to explore and experiment. We knew that if we continued working the same way as before, we would not succeed in reaching our goals.
Working with Antrop: A glimpse into the collaboration
-The flexibility and expertise of Antrop have allowed the lab to evolve at the necessary pace, aligned with Sida as an organization. They quickly familiarized themselves with our operations and dared to raise the questions required to challenge us at Sida to think differently. Antrop also shared experiences from previous assignments, providing context for our challenges, thus facilitating and clarifying the decision-making processes, Klas Waldenström explains.
To shape the lab’s contribution to the organization and define its working methods, the process began with Antrop and their partner, PA Consulting, going through several stages in an exploratory phase:
“Valuable ideas and insights can originate from various sources. Service design helps elevate diverse voices and perspectives on how we can enhance our operations. As experts, it can sometimes be challenging for us to let go and acknowledge that there is much we don’t know and need to discover during the development process.”
Klas Waldenström, Program Manager at Sida
Sida Lab serves as a safe zone where participants can step out of their regular roles and contribute to the development of operations. It is an environment where any missteps are seen as opportunities for learning.
Sanne Blylod, Digital Change Manager at Sida, highlights the essence of the new working approach.
– Our starting point is to gather selected individuals around a challenge or unexplored opportunity. Ideally, participants come from different parts of the organization, have diverse personalities, perspectives, and roles. Together, they explore problems, generate ideas, and test solutions. This space allows for flexibility and embraces the notion of trial and error. Testing, iterating, and continuous learning take place at a much faster pace compared to the agency’s usual working methods. The goal is to complete the work in a matter of weeks or months,” says Sanne Blylod.
In order to achieve lasting change in development cooperation efforts, it is not sufficient to innovate solely on a project basis. To ensure an impactful transformation across the organization, capacity-building is necessary. This involves creating conditions for widespread adoption of the new Sida Lab approach by most employees and garnering support from managers and decision-makers.
To achieve this, efforts include anchoring Sida Lab within the organization through activities such as conducting training during Sida’s annual learning weeks, organizing Hack Days (dedicated to collaborative problem-solving), establishing a physical lab space, and continuously evaluating and showcasing the impact of the different lab initiatives. These actions foster curiosity and an understanding of the value Sida Lab brings, both to the organization and to development cooperation efforts at large.
-There is a curiosity and significant interest among Sida employees to work in this way, and a need to further explore and work with design thinking,” says Maria Klint, Service Designer at Antrop, who has been involved with Sida Lab since its inception in autumn 2019.
– Since the start, we have conducted around 20 innovation labs, addressing topics ranging from the green transition within the textile sector in Bangladesh to how Sida, as an organization, deals with knowledge acquisition in a world where change is happening at an ever-accelerating pace,” says Maria Klint, Service Designer at Antrop.
The new working approach has generated significant internal interest and quickly transitioned from being a side project to an established change program – one that Sida intends to invest in for the future.
-More and more employees internally want to work in this way. We see increased interest both within Sida and from our partners. Apart from the innovations arising from the projects themselves, the valuable outcome lies in the organizational shift – the willingness and capacity to embrace new ways of working,” adds Maria Klint.
What are the most important lessons you have learned from the project? — Innovation and design processes are challenging, and it takes a long time for a value-driven organization to grasp how they can be relevant to the operations. Sida has time-consuming processes, and we must navigate them without losing energy, which Antrop assists us with,” explains Klas Waldenström.
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Sara Nero
