Embracing Bold Innovation

Chaos is often treated as a four-letter word.

But chaos is often a necessary stage in the journey from a status quo that isn’t working to a future that is more sustainable and equitable.

When truly novel innovations scale up, they escape their secure test beds and drive disruptive change in the real world. Things can get unpredictable and uncomfortable as familiar patterns, power dynamics, and operating models change.

Systems like to stay put. They dilute incremental efforts at change. Sometimes they need the force of a truly breakthrough solution to create enough disruption, destabilize their equilibrium, and resettle to a better state.

Along this journey, Innovators face pushback, skepticism, and outright rejection.

Then occasionally, an idea manages to crack something open, clearing a path to reconsider assumptions and reshape how things work.

Pushing Into Unchartered Territory

At The Rockefeller Foundation, our commitment to innovation and breakthrough solutions sometimes means we don’t agree with expert consensus. We sometimes side with the renegade who has a bolder idea, the maverick who wants to roll the dice on a big step forward.

We encourage innovators to push boundaries and go against the grain, but without being iconoclasts who alienate partners we may ultimately need to join an alliance to drive change at scale.

Zia Khan (right) with John McArthur of the Brookings Institution, during 2022’s 17 Rooms convening.

Innovation demands urgency. Change requires momentum. Breakthrough solutions push us into uncharted territory before policies, processes, or even public opinion catches up.

Those are the risks worth taking, where we put our reputation, knowledge, and resources on the line to hopefully seize the rewards that are out of reach from conventional methods.

Our work in support of transformative change is the theme for this quarter’s Matter of Impact, and it’s what we embrace every day at The Rockefeller Foundation.

This quarter, we celebrate initiatives by our grantees to implement the first Swahili large language AI model to support maternal and newborn health in the face of climate change, support solar energy and battery storage to help community churches become resilience havens during disasters, reimagine financing systems to fund Amazon reforestation, and more.

A History of Innovation

The Foundation has been innovative since the moment of its founding in 1913. It pioneered a new approach to scientific philanthropy with a strategic plan to bring together experts from a range of fields to solve the root causes of human challenges.

We’ve continued to spark systems change throughout our history. I personally worked on our very first grant to create a business case for rural mini-grid prototypes in India aimed at supporting livelihoods; many thought we would fail, but mini-grids are now a mainstream technology for electricity access.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped create the field of impact investing, coining the term in 2007, and launching the Global Impact Investing Network.

We led campaigns to eradicate diseases considered endemic at the time, like hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever. We developed new strains of wheat, rice, and maize that were disease-resistant and produced significantly higher yields per acre.

But we can’t stop. We can’t even slow down.

Innovation isn’t just about progress — it’s about survival. The problems we face are accelerating, and incremental change won’t cut it. We need big, urgent leaps in thinking, technology, and action to reshape the future. Together, let’s take the risk and embrace transformative change, because embracing the status quo and incremental change is even riskier.