🗓️ When: Thursday September 19th, 1:00pm UTC
📍 Where: Online, a Zoom link will be provided
🎟 Price: Free
The power of the carve-out
Art Fry invented the post-it note during his ‘15% time’ at 3M.
Paul Buchheit created Gmail as his '20% project' at Google.
For the last 6 years, Brink has helped to create 'carve-outs' within organisations to make innovation like this possible.
Carve-outs provide a space where people can explore, collaborate, and experiment while being less constrained by the governance and caretaking of business as usual.
Alongside our partners and clients, we have:
- Created an award-winning programme for UK civil servants to fund, test and mainstream cutting edge tech.
- Managed 'Sandbox' environments for governments, NGOs, and technologists to experiment with new edtech ideas.
- Supported philanthropists and donors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, and World Bank, to validate assumptions before big investments.
Join our expert panel for an honest discussion about how to build an effective carve-out. We'll dive into the mechanisms that make carve-outs work, the incentives that encourage innovation, and the mindsets to experiment in the face of complex challenges. By the end of this event, you will have a real understanding of the options for curating carve-outs in your own context.
If we want to deliver real world, enduring impact then we have to recognise that those doing the work of innovating are (like every human) messy and irrational people.
If we want to deliver the kind of outcomes we seek for people and the planet, then first we have to explore how people think and respond. Only then can we unlock the kind of behaviours that will get us where we need to be.
Over the last six years Brink has developed an approach to do just this; combining elements of the behavioural sciences with innovation methodologies to put the human dimension front and centre.
This approach allows teams to transform the way people work together; and to move away from dogmatic theory, received wisdom and rigid programmes and towards creative, frequent iteration. We call it Behavioural Innovation. There's more about how we've applied Behavioural Innovation to some real world challenges, on this page.
This event is for you if...
- You are trying to make innovation happen in a large, complex organisation or system.
- Bureaucracy and entrenched ideas are making it tough for your teams to test new ideas.
- There's a strong feeling that there's "no time" for dedicated discovery, learning and future-proofing.
- Your team's ability to do the work that really matters is being hampered by a fear of failure, squandering public money, or taking undue risks.
- You're in an organisational culture where it's easier to sign off a £50m project than a £50k one.
- You believe that carving out a space, away from the usual checks and balances, could provide a way for you to test new ideas quickly and effectively.
You can secure your place at this event by clicking this button and entering your details. The event is completely free and open to all.
If you'd like to ask us any questions about this event then you can reach us on coffee@hellobrink.co
Clio Dintilhac
Senior Program Officer
Clio spearheads a portfolio of investments, to improve the quality and availability of evidence on at-scale education interventions in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to joining the Foundation, Clio worked at Boston Consulting Group and as a government advisor to the Africa Governance Initiative in Ethiopia.
Clio leads the
uBoraBora programme, delivered by Brink and Laterite with seed funding from the Gates Foundation. uBoraBora supports implementation research to learn how proven ideas can actually deliver learning outcomes in foundational literacy and numeracy - and scales that knowledge across education systems in sub-Saharan Africa.
Steven Hunt
Senior Energy Innovation Advisor
Steven has pioneered initiatives within the Research & Evidence Directorate of the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). This includes harnessing tech and innovation to enable global progress to clean energy, as well as supporting new ways of working within FCDO.
Between 2016-20, Steven led the
Frontier Technologies Hub. Delivered by Brink, alongside DT Global and R4D, the Hub provided funding and support for civil servants across FCDO to test the role of technologies including drones, AI, 3D printing, and electric vehicles in solving big global development challenges. The programme was awarded the Civil Service award for Innovation in 2017.
Suha Tutunji
Head of Refugee Education
Based in Lebanon, Suha leads Jusoor's education programmes for Syrian refugees. Suha is a co-founder and board member of an NGO called
CARE (Consultancy and Advocacy for Remedial Education) that caters to students with learning disabilities.
Suha led a collaboration with Jusoor and Brink on the EdTech Hub programme. In response to COVID-19 related school closures, we carved out a Sandbox to test Whatsapp based classrooms for refugee learners. The approaches used in the Sandbox were published
in the Journal for Education Emergencies
Eunice Gatama
Group Head, Ecosystems, Partnerships & Digital Lending
Over the last 20 years, Eunice has led innovation initiatives across the banking and telecommunications sectors in Kenya. As Senior Product Manager at Safaricom, she supported the growth of M-PESA, which launched in 2007 and is used by almost 70% of Kenya’s population today. In her current role at I&M Bank, she works with I&M’s internal teams and partners to build and test new ideas.
Eunice is an Acumen Fellow, and passionate about the role of innovation in financial inclusion.
Moderator: Abi Freeman
Co-Founder
Abi is one of Brink's two co-founders and an organisational psychologist. Her role is split between practitioner exploring how Behavioural Innovation can make dents on the world, and co-founder, designing and building a global company that’s a force for good and a brilliant place to work. She believes in the power of mindsets, collaboration, lifelong learning and what people and (mindfully designed) technology are capable of, together.
