VIENNA – The UNIDO Innovation Incubator is igniting innovation at UNIDO and helping teams apply Design Thinking methods to go from hunches to validated solutions. Co-hosted by the UNIDO Innovation Lab and its partner RITA, Vienna University of Economics and Business, the five-week-long programme brought together diverse teams from across UNIDO to foster innovation and collaboration in developing tangible solutions for addressing critical challenges and opportunities in digitalization, energy efficiency, green hydrogen and innovative financing.

The Incubator provided a supportive space for the teams to experiment and iterate their ideas. The effort and time commitment of the participants was crucial in ensuring the success of the programme, as they brought expertise and technical know-how from their technical work across the world.

The Incubator provided a platform for cross-functional teams to work together, breaking down silos and promoting a more integrated approach to problem-solving. During the Incubator, the teams refined and developed their projects, with regular feedback sessions and guidance from experts and peers. The solutions developed were tailored to the users’ needs as identified through interviews and further tested with the user during the programme. The participating teams demonstrated great potential and innovative thinking in their respective fields as they were encouraged by the facilitators to test their ideas, validate assumptions, and create solutions with concrete impact.

During its five week course the Innovation Incubator demonstrated the importance of shifting perspectives and testing assumptions, providing the foundation for tangible solutions to critical challenges and opportunities. The programme also enabled the participants to tap into their creativity and approach their respective challenges from a human-centred perspective.

The first Incubator cohort will now move forward to implementing their solutions. These include a platform to support the development of green hydrogen ecosystems in countries, the establishment of a venture fund to provide services around financial instruments, better integrating the UNIDO field and headquarters personnel through virtual communities, and providing the building blocks for the implementation of the Montreal Protocol and the Kigali Amendment.

The UNIDO Innovation Lab will continue to provide support to the first Incubator cohort. The success of this pilot programme, evidenced by the solutions developed, shows that expanding the initiative and investing further in innovation and collaboration benefits not only the teams and participants, but also UNIDO as a whole’s transformation into an ever more modern and agile agency working towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

"At UNIDO we embrace innovation as a tool for progress to find concrete solutions, and the UNIDO Innovation Incubator enables exactly that: it supports early-stage innovation. It also helps UNIDO teams collaborate better to focus on practical solutions for energy efficiency, tackling climate change and using technology to multiply impacts," underlined UNIDO Director General Gerd Müller: “We are proud of the outcomes of the Incubator programme and looking forward fostering more innovation and collaboration to create a better future for all. Working together in the spirit of innovation we can achieve more.”