The Colour of Innovation is a podcast on innovation brought to you by the United Nations Development Programme. Innovation for development is about disrupting the way things work, or don’t… and using creative approaches for solving difficult problems that people experience every day.

With this podcast, UNDP brings to you stories of innovation from across the Arab States. In each episode, we introduce social innovators, sharing their inspirations and their ideas, their passions and their projects for changing the world. In each episode, we will focus on a specific innovation methodology that UNDP Country Offices and their partners use in “doing development differently,” including behavioral insights, design thinking, social innovation camps, green technology, and civic technology.

Why the title, Colour of Innovation? We feel it causes the brain to reflect, reframe, and rev up, just like innovation itself.  First, by stopping to question this unlikely concept: innovation has a colour?  Second, by re-orienting around a new way of thinking: yes, of course, innovation has a colour, for example, blue, as in blue sky thinking; green, as in all things new; white, as in a blank slate. And finally, by getting excited about the possibility of doing development differently

With this podcast, we hope to demystify innovation; to demonstrate its flexibility, by showing how it can be interpreted in so many different ways; and to display its power to engage, connect, and think differently. We hope to provide encouragement for newcomers to come on board, to promote experimentation with new approaches, and leave us all feeling just a little bit more hopeful for our collective future. 

Make sure to follow and subscribe as we will be releasing a new episode weekly.

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Whatsapp for What’s Down

This is a story of how UNDP Lebanon is using WhatsApp, one of the world’s most popular messaging applications, to help people speak their minds and shape their own narratives. In using WhatsApp, UNDP Lebanon created a mechanism to capture individual stories and gain deeper insights into daily frustrations and tensions among Syrian refugees and host communities in Lebanon