The Istanbul Innovation Days (IID) have become a well-known annual gathering of partners to explore and accelerate organizational learning about emerging trends and innovative approaches to development and policy making. For UNDP, IID have emerged as a central R&D mechanism to help rethink and challenge our work continuously and build a new generation of services with and for our partners and clients by incentivizing emerging initiatives and experiments around strategic issues.

This year, the IID features #NextGenGov, focusing on emerging global trends impacting governance mechanisms and approaches and aiming to contextualize their potential implications around the world through collaborative experimentation

In a complex and rapidly changing world, it will not be sufficient to analyse, theorize and subsequently roll out traditional answers to the fundamental challenges we face. We see the emergence of new threats as well as opportunities for the futures of human rights, responsive institutions, civic activism & participation, and conflict resolution.  At the point of intersection among these individual policy streams the IID will present a series of experiments, both challenging and acting as a provocation and to explore the key fundamental question: How can we take ahuman-centered approach to developing and deploying 21st century technology and innovation to unlock more just, sustainable, inclusive and peaceful societies?

At IID, organised this year in partnership with Dark Matter Laboratories of London, we will bring together internal and external partners to showcase methodologies and practical examples of innovative governance and peacebuilding practices in different countries and settings. Our aim is to facilitate wider discussions and create spaces for experimentation complementary to our existing practices with a greater focus on innovation in governance and peacebuilding.