intervention narratives.

This unit plays an enabling role within UNDP’s Strategic Plan, facilitating the transition from sectoral challenges towards systemic transformation opportunities. Its advisory lines are structured around four fundamental pillars:

1. Portfolio Cohesion: The SIU helps Country Offices shift from isolated projects to integrated portfolios with strategic purpose, aligned with public policy priorities. This integration fosters synergies, cross-learning, and greater impact.
2. Activation of New Thematic Offerings: In collaboration with GPN teams, the unit designs proposals based on systemic logic. A concrete example is the development of the Future of Work Portfolio Building Toolkit, a tool for configuring portfolios on the future of work from an inclusive growth perspective.
3. Generation of Transformative Demand: By building ecosystems with governments and donors, the SIU promotes relational partnerships that transcend transactional relationships, creating enabling environments for the adoption of systemic approaches.
4. Institutional Capacity Development: The unit facilitates the incorporation of new competencies to manage uncertainty, identify structural barriers to change, and act on adaptive challenges through transformational thinking frameworks.

The SIU works closely with other units such as the Accelerator Labs, UNDP’s Chief Digital Office, and the SDG Finance Hub, ensuring a cross-cutting integration of innovation across all development spheres. It also provides strategic resources such as methodological guides, systems monitoring frameworks, and co-learning spaces.

This commitment to systems thinking and strategic innovation has been applied in multiple contexts, from the design of urban circular economies to the reconfiguration of the future of work in countries like Ghana and Bolivia. The lessons learned reinforce the idea that addressing 21st-century challenges requires more flexible, collaborative, and learning-oriented structures.

Through the SIU, UNDP reaffirms its commitment to deep institutional transformation, capable of supporting countries not only in solving problems but also in redesigning systems towards more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable futures.

This article was originally published in: https://undp.sharepoint.com/teams/BPPS-Portal/SitePages/Strategic-Innovation.aspx