“You also want to avoid this culture of ‘innovation is this shiny magic bullet’. No.That's also a culture that we want to demystify. Innovation is ways of thinking, ways of doing, and of course ways of achieving concrete, tangible results (and) outcomes –impact at scale.”
Adaptation is essential to innovation. Growing up in Togo, West Africa, Laté Lawson-Lartego worked a summer job as a community volunteer, exposing him early on to the disparities happening in his backyard. As more of the industry opened up to him, he began to realize the systematic problems stifling the field’s progress. Inspired to expand his knowledge, Laté continued to travel and grow his educational portfolio, but rising political unrest in Togo unexpectedly forced him to flee his home country.
The sudden departure caused Laté to develop a new, invaluable skill: the ability to adapt and progress amid risk and uncertainty. From there, hard work, combined with his wealth of knowledge, led him to his position as Chief Innovation Officer at Oxfam, where he develops leadership strategies to best build and support innovation within the organization.
In this episode, Laté tells us more about how his work and personal experiences allowed him to find the balance between taking leaps of faith and being overly strategic in order to cultivate and grow innovation.
Contents
1 - Discovering divides
2 - Laté’s first innovations
3 - Building Room For Innovation at large organizations
4 - Embracing failure
5 - Balancing controlled failure and pushing the boundaries
Chief Innovation Officer
Dr. Laté Lawson-Lartego leads Oxfam’s Global Innovation Lab for Equality (aGILE), which is focused on identifying innovative solutions to problems created by inequality. He also leads Oxfam America’s work on creating equitable, nourishing, and regenerative food systems for all.
He has held other senior leadership positions with Oxfam and other international organizations including CARE, where he and his team pioneered the organization’s first Market Engagement and Agriculture Value Chain Development strategy and implementation—an initiative that reached more than 10 million people.
Dr. Lawson-Lartego earned a doctoral degree in business administration at Georgia State University in the US, with a focus on innovative business strategies and value co-creation between business and bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) people. He also earned master's degrees in economics and business from the University of Lomé in Togo, and in social and rural development from Reading University in the UK.
Dr. Lawson-Lartego’s publications include “Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles for Agri-Food Systems Transformation.”
