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> Posted by Kim Wilson, the Fletcher School, Tufts University
In the olden days, awards were not given for innovation itself but for how effective an innovation was in relation to the importance of the problem it solved. But what we see today in financial inclusion is the ubiquity of innovation – often front and center – as the lead determinant in a plethora of prize competitions. Check the first judging criteria of this prestigious contest.
Why would the entity commissioning the award, The Wall Street Journal, care about how innovative or unique the business was or how it broke from tradition? Wouldn’t it care most about how well the service solved a problem and the problem’s significance?
In financial inclusion, innovation itself has been an endgame for quite some time. Take the much-hyped “Keep the Change,” Bank of America’s program to hoover in payment leftovers at the cash register. If you buy $3.80 worth of coffee, the amount is rounded to $4.00 of which twenty cents goes to your bank account. Greeted as a clever way to encourage savings, the idea was indeed innovative back in 2006. But was it good? Here is what a critic, citing another critic, had to say about Keep the Change: “If you want something that makes it quick and easy, lets you fool yourself into thinking you’re actually saving, (spend-to-save) programs are good.” But despite this perversion, Keep the Change has been the winner of multiple awards, many with innovation in their descriptions.
Plenty of ideas are creative and go nowhere. That’s where the ideas I have in the shower go, where they should, down the drain. But innovation is the crack-cocaine of the funding world. Funders including donors and impact investors want to be thought of as doing something new and what is newer than innovation? Innovation is the new excellence, the new buzzword, the new impact.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
In my breakout group at CFI’s workshop last week in Bogota, everyone talked at once. With eight voices coming at me, my brain’s very basic ability to understand Spanish shut down. The workshop participants were bursting with ideas they urgently wanted to express. But, as my colleague Sonja Kelly pointed out, a situation where everyone is speaking and no one is listening is an apt metaphor for the problem the workshop sought to address.
The workshop focused on the challenges in integrating insights from behavioral economics into the operations of financial institutions. Two organizations that leverage behavioral economics for product design, ideas42 and Innovations for Poverty Action, presented the research perspective. Closely connected with academics at Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton, both organizations start from the research finding that a number of cognitive and emotional biases cause people to make decisions that depart from rationality, and that these biases can significantly affect the use of financial services. Ideas42 focuses on identifying features in product design and delivery that, while not overruling choice, nudge people in a desirable direction – features such as commitment savings accounts or reminder messages to encourage savings. IPA promotes the same kinds of nudges, but focuses on the testing of these innovations through randomized controlled trials.
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