Advancing the Evidence and Innovations: Learnings from the Futurebound Summit

This month, the Futurebound Summit brought together entrepreneurs, funders, policy makers, and other experts to build community and drive innovation with a shared goal of driving systemic and sustained change for child development.

Our team at OMNI engaged in multiple sessions during the week, from the kick-off events to leading a catalyst session focused on “Advancing the Evidence for Innovations in Child Development” alongside our long-term partner the Family Resource Center Association. We were inspired by all the ventures and others tackling real issues in child development, poverty, and health. And, we learned a lot ourselves by reflecting on how research and evaluation can accelerate the impact in this space.

Innovations are often defined as the first, best, or only. In other words, innovations are by definition, untested. That leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Does the intervention work? Who is it truly helping? What conditions make it successful?

At the same time, an evidence base lends credibility to attract investments and resources and new ventures. With lots of questions, and a need to demonstrate impact and substantive change, evaluation can play a critical role in helping ventures throughout their lifecycle, from conception to demonstrating impact at scale.

While research and evaluation are often seen as taking too long and slowing innovation, we came away from last week seeing only opportunities to advance the evidence. We saw these opportunities pop up during lots of conversations– like how developing indicators can help unpack assumptions and clear up misconceptions about an innovation’s goal, how developing leading indicators can help startups implement rapid-cycle evaluation to learn quickly, and how testing fidelity in the early stages can help refine the ‘special sauce’ of an innovation.

Ultimately, using evaluation to advance the evidence can offer myriad benefits. And while evaluation is often relegated to the social sector, a framework for advancing the evidence can provide impact and value to any social venture, impact investing, and other innovative initiatives solutions.