1. In Moiru, the social innovation process focussed on gender equality, decent work and economic growth that we designed in collaboration with the National University of Itapua, we observed that students were not well prepared to take advantage of the opportunity to design and propose innovation pilot projects and were generally too overwhelmed by their curricular and work activities to dedicate necesary time. The conclusion we reached is that this type of program should be integrated into curricular activities, specifically the university extension program, in order to optimize students' investment of time and create stronger incentives for their participation.  2. In the Public Innovators' innovation course, we observed that there is a very strong tendency for the innovation teams across all the participating ministries to propose innovation projects related to digitilization and information management, leaving other types of public innovation, especially innovation in public policies and public service design neglected. On the one hand, we concluded from this that this project should focus in the short term on providing user experience reseearch support to the public innovation teams, as opposed to the broader public policy design and impact evaluation support we initially prioritized. On the other hand, developing capacities for public policy and public service innovation seems to require working in a longer timeframe that would permit public officials to invest time in generating, analyzing, and reflecting on evidence, desigining and refining new policy ideas, and developing pilot programs and evaluation strategies.  3. In our collaboration with the National Innovation Strategy (ENI) in general, we observed a gradual evolution and broadening of the orientation and conceptualization of innovation that we attribute in part to the experiences of applied R&D +I that ENI team undertook in collaboration with UNDP's AccLab. The ENI's initial focus and vision was linked narrowly to creating startup enterprises. But as the team completed various stages of the strategy's development, for example the participatory definition of innovation challenges, the execution of learning loops on food security and flexible manufactring, and the design and implementation of a public innovation course and pilot projects, it incorporated methodologies, tools, and concepts proposed and developed by the acclab team and gradually evolved toward a focus on mission-oriented public research and development and the development of human capital and innovation skills in the public, private and social sectors. This evolution in turn helped to overcome initial political and competitive tensions between the ENI and the National Science and Technology Council (CONACYT), as the two teams began to collaborate and see their work as complimentary. 4. The publication of our toolkit for studies of positive deviance in the performanc of "street-level bureaucrats" recieved enthusiastic responses from civil society actors focussed on improving accountability and the quality of governance. This method seems to have a lot of potential for structuring productive and innovative collaborations.  5. An insight that cuts across all the activities in this portfolio is that the scarcity of human capital trained and experienced in R&D+I  methodologies and processes is a major roadblock for the initiatives that the acclab has propsoed and executed with the public, academic, and civil society sectors. Major investments in training specialists in these areas are necessary in order to accelerate and scale up the types of initiatives the acclab has supported. 

Public Innovators Pilot Projects  
Moiru 2022
Public Innovators Training Course
Toolkit: Studying Positive Deviance for Public Service Reform

As mentioned above as part of the main insights, the bottlenecks we encountered have to do with the scarcity of human resources trained in R&D+I concepts and methods. This increases the financial, administrative, and time costs of aquiriing adequate consulting services. For example, limited capacities in these areas have caused us to have  to rescind contracts, invest more of our own time than initially budgeted to complement or revise consultants' work, and extend and revise timelines for the innovation processes and pilot projects.

Utilizing collective inteligence, institutional knowledge, and grassroots knowledge was a high priority for the learning loops and projects in this protfolio,  because they are designed to stregnthen and extend existing or emergent capacities within different institutions and across different sectors to carry out research, development, and innovation activities.

Facilitating experiences applying participatory design and inovation methos was a priority for this portfolio of projects, because they are designed to stregnthen and extend existing or emergent capacities within different institutions and across different sectors to carry out research, development, and innovation activities.

For the learning loop on positive deviance in the performance of community health agents we partnered with an NGO (Tesai Reka Paraguay) founded by local peasant movements with decades of experience working on issues of local public health access and policy. They carried out the pilot intervention to create conciousnesses of the utility of participatory health planning methodologies and train the members of family health units in the use of some of these methods.

For Moiru, community inovaiton challange, we partnered with the National University of Asuncion. The process recruited mixed teams of one professor and four students from different schools or campuses within the university to design and propose community innovations at the intersection of gender equality, decent work and economic growth, and we will select two of these proposals to implement and evaluate pilot projects. 

The Public Innovator's training course engaged the National Innovation Strategy and teams from 11 different ministries. The teams from the Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security and the Social Cabinate Delivery Unit were selected by a panel of judges and public voting to implement their pilot projects. 

Both Tesaireka Paraguay (TRP) and the National University of Itapua (UNI) were unusual partners for UNDP.  TRP has very strong connection to grassroots organizations that represent vulnerable rural populations with long histories of struggle and commitment to community development. UNI is a regional university with a socioeconomically diverse population of students in a region that manifests a combination of rapid agroindustrial growth, urban and real estatate development, and social exclusion. 

This action learning portfolio put us in close contact with a very broad set of public officials and gave us insight into the political, human resource, and institutional barriers to adopting R&D+I methods in Paraguay.