Earlier this year, to celebrate International Women’s Day, on 8 March, ILRI compiled twoWILD (Women-In-Livestock-Development) Pinterest Boards:

(1) Profiles of women at (or formerly with) ILRI

WILD: Women in Livestock Development (200 pins to date)

https://www.pinterest.com/susan_macmillan/wild-women-in-livestock-development/

(2) Profiles of women in related research and development work that have never worked for ILRI but that ILRI much admire:

WILD: Some of our favourite women heroes and partners 78 pins to date)

https://www.pinterest.com/susan_macmillan/wild-some-of-our-favourite-women-heroes-and-partne/

These women profiles generated much interest, particularly the second Pinterest Board of high-profile women we much admire.

We emailed links to the Pinterest Board to all the women profiled on the Board (when we had their email contacts); and we let the others know that we had included them on our Pinterest Board by tweeting to them on Twitter. The response from these famous, high-powered women was amazing. Everyone other than a handful (e.g., Mary Robinson, Margaret Kenyatta, Melinda Gates) responded by saying how thrilled they were to be included. Several treated our Pinterest Board rather like an award of some kind! That got us to thinking that we had here a group of highly influential women, many of them on the boundary of ILRI work, who seemed to be interested in continuing relations with ILRI. So we started dreaming up an idea for what ILRI could do with these women to celebrate International Women’s Day 2016.

An idea came up, that on International Women’s Day 2016 we could organize a high-profile meeting including the WILD women - and among them funders,  gender scientists, gender practitioners, policy makers, politicians etc - to discuss major issues in gender and livestock and related interventions. We could then prepare a project that combines the best ideas from the minds of all these great women and find funding opportunities.

This initiative makes our funding approach pro-active and participatory by involving a large set of stakeholders who are not on the receiving end of proposals, policy briefs etc...but are involved in the very identification of problems and interventions. We are excited to see this even happen!

Vision: A co-working hub to facilitate innovation

We create a state-of-the-art Co-Working Space—with stimulating atmosphere, good WIFI and strong coffee—that encourages new conversations, new ideas, new research collaborations, and new ways of doing business. We do this by transforming the InfoCentre from a large comfortable traditional space for quiet work into a large, stimulating, co-working hub for innovation.

Casual conversations arise where people come together. Sometimes, these conversations lead to unexpected ideas. At this point you want to grab another coffee and go sit down away from the bar in a quiet corner with a whiteboard and type that up.

This innovation hub actively encourages people of different disciplines, interests and backgrounds to come together in an open co-working space. The community of users includes ILRI staff, consultants, clients, and visitors. It is the ‘offline’ part of ILRI’s efforts to create an enabling environment for research collaboration. It responds to the needs underscored in ILRI's (draft) Science Strategy for better integrated research and for more cross-program, -region and CRP idea fertilization and collaboration. And much else.

As new forms of collaboration also serve to strengthen networks, to attract outside expertise and to recombine ideas and methods in fresh and productive ways, the spin-off benefits of establishing such a space for innovation may be even greater than the direct benefits of doing so.

With your inputs, we will design a dramatically different kind of work space, one that enhances teamwork and insights from every corner of our institute and beyond and provides a broad array of every day work space choices, from intimate to big and noisy. We've already thought through several of the many extant and exciting ways to create such a space. It need not take a lot of money. What it does take is a focus on the important over the urgent.

Vote for this idea and if it wins, you are guaranteed free coffees for a year!

Do you see a need for such a space? Let us know in the comments below. Other ideas welcome!

And in case you need it, here's some inspiration (click on 'See on Pinterest' link).

Follow benhack's board Co-working space: ILRI Info Center Nairobi on Pinterest

The need for more integration / collaboration among ourselves across projects / programs is considered to be crucial as we envision the way forward. Maybe it is time to assess our organizational structure, identify where the ‘connections’ are missing, and then jointly establish the linkages with a workable processes put in place that will enable to achieve the desired outcomes and impact at scale.

"Bridge seminars" (and exploring teams) to boost cooperation across research areas that various people are working on

We are all busy with our ongoing team work, projects etc. This IPM is revealing some gaps in communication, cooperation, collaboration across our programs and teams.

Here is an idea that could bridge that gap on a regular basis, not just waiting for the next IPM to happen and help us integrate our work.

We have regular seminars in different programs, we used to have institutional seminars, and both had one slight problem: they tended to bring together the people already involved in that work in one program (LSE folks for an LSE seminar, Bioscience folks for a BS one...).

Thinking slightly differently...
We could identify a number of 'bridge areas' that more than one team is working on: feed resources, aflatoxins, governance systems etc. (I'm sure you know better than me what these research areas could be). Once we have identified these areas we could basically organise:

• A small 'exploring team' of people from these different teams, working around these areas to bridge the gaps, identify what each person/team is doing around this topic; what complementarities, overlaps and gaps there are; what recommendations each of these actors could/should play in addressing the gaps;
• A good overview of the science/literature/projects of ILRI and partners on this topic (leading to e.g. an information sheet about this research area);
• A seminar that brings these different perspectives together and focuses on the implications for various programs, if not ILRI as a whole;
• A sort of soft system to decide whether ILRI should invest more in this area (e.g. institutionalise this research area) or how to take the recommendations made for each of the teams working on this area forward;
• A very small group meeting e.g. 2x/year to assess what the next 'bridge areas' to focus on are?

Over time, we can safely expect this increased cooperation will actually accelerate, as more ideas are exchanged and everyone is getting used to looking beyond their area of focus (i.e. looking out of our own 'box').

Whatever the structure of our teams and programs in ILRI, if we focus just on how we are organized formally there will always be some collaboration gaps and 'silo biases' across the institute, so this type of mechanism could be a way to more informally keep on bridging the work across all of us and make sure we integrate our work better (thereby saving time and not competing for resources).

Join this idea and turn our institute into a bridging, learning institute that focuses on integrating the good work that's happening in various parts of ILRI.