Head of Experimentation, Bangkok Regional Innovation Center

Background

Global development challenges have become increasingly interrelated, requiring us to take interdisciplinary approaches and seek non-linear solutions. Important development trends like urbanization, climate change, and inequality pose significant challenges on our path to achieve the 2030 agenda of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These transformations happening against the background of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) are questioning our traditional approaches to development design and delivery.

Given the systemic nature of development challenges faced by the region, as well as the opportunities opened up by the fast advancements in local markets, UNDP RBAP decided to establish the Regional Innovation Center (RIC) in Bangkok, Thailand, to spearhead institutionalization of the new ways of doing development, provide a safe space to test development solutions through a structured portfolio of policy experiments, and encourage a culture  that would help UNDP be on the front-foot in terms of spotting, understanding and integrating new development approaches into its work. The RIC has four core functions with different but linked scope: exploration, experimentation, scaling-up, and capacity building. This is consistent with the set up of the recently launched UNDP’s Accelerator Labs network, which is conceived as the world’s largest and fastest learning network around development challenges

The experimentation function is the empirical learning engine to retain the RIC’s relevance for the key stakeholders in dealing with strategic risks the countries in the region are facing. To this extent, the Regional Center has developed a sensemaking and acceleration protocol as a unique capability it can bring to Country Offices and government counterparts. A key responsibility of the experimentation function is to help implement and keep evolving the protocol to maintain its relevance to UNDP’s context.

In addition, the experimentation function ensures that the portfolio of experiments designed with Country Offices in the region is coherent with the nature of the systemic challenges UNDP and regional governments have to tackle, scales up learning through intensive interaction and reflection, and feeds insights into program implementation

 The experimentation function works closely and coordinates activities with heads of experimentation in each Accelerator Lab.

Duties and Responsibilities

Scope of work:

1. Sense-making and support to development program coherence

• Provide guidance and support to clients (country offices and national governments) in applying sense-making and other approaches to assess and strengthen internal coherence of their programs;
• Provide support to the clients’ strategic decision-making on logic and new directions/pivots for the increased relevance of the program;
• Lead on operationalization and continuous improvement of the RIC’s sense-making protocol;
• Provide support to the clients’ staff in developing their in-house capacity to apply sense-making to ensure continuous coherence and relevance of the program.

2. Applying portfolio logic to experimentation

• Help clients define logic and main hypotheses for the portfolio of experiments to respond to systemic development challenges at hand;
• Help develop criteria of the portfolio design and a roadmap to guide clients’ in portfolio development;
• Over time, develop a systematic approach to portfolio design.

3. Experiment design and prototype testing

• Provide strategic advice on the design of experiments and the testing of relevant prototypes, including (but not limited to) presenting methodological options for experiment design, roll-out and validation based on the experiment conditions, resources available, and requirements;
• Develop a framework to capture the learning from the experiments in such a way that it favours critical reflection and rapid adaptation over static reporting;
• Examine the results from the testing of prototypes and translate them into programmatic decisions on next steps and implications for improvement and scaling-up;
• Help clients develop their own in-house capacity on experimental design.

4. Learning, community building and working out loud

• Help systemically infuse portfolio logic into clients’ ways of working;
• Working with clients to encourage reflection and capturing of insights from individual experiments, as they related to the overall portfolio logic;
• Help coordinate a community of practice for heads of experimentation in Accelerator Labs;

• Provide technical consultation and training for governments, UNDP country offices, partners, and other clients through various phases including asset mapping, developing a portfolio logic, experiment design, prototype testing, and evaluation.

5. Strategic development and operation of the RIC

• Contribute to the formulation of the RIC’s service lines and development priorities;

• Jointly with the UNDP COs and relevant programme teams engage with clients to formulate pipeline of projects responding to their needs and demands for the RIC’s service delivery;
• Support other activities related to the design and operation of the RIC.

Expected Outputs and Deliverables:

The consultant is expected to deliver the followings:

• Help institutionalize and continuously fine-tune RIC’s sense-making protocol;
• Develop methodologies for a portfolio approach and experiment design that are suitable for the UNDP context. Encourage their dissemination to country offices and governments through learning by doing;
• Work with clients to apply the portfolio logic, design the portfolio of experiments, and assist them in the implementation;
• Develop support materials (guidelines, templates, etc.) that can guide clients through the experimentation process;
• Trainings, webinars and capacity building sessions on all aspects of experimentation;
• Write blog posts and contribute to generating learnings and experience from experiments and share them within the RIC network;
• Support the planning and implementation of RIC activities.

Institutional Arrangement:

The Head of Experimentation will be directly supervised by the Director of the Bangkok Regional Innovation Center. S/he is expected to work closely with the programme team and operation team in the UNDP related to the initiatives in the RIC and support to advance the broader innovation agenda in the UNDP.

Working space, facilities, personnel, project information related to the UNDP and the RIC, as well as logistical support will be provided as needed throughout the assignment of the contract.

Duration of the Assignment:

1 December 2019 – 30 November 2020, with maximum 240 days worked (maximum 20 days/month for 12 months)

Duty Station:

Bangkok, Thailand with possible travel for missions

The Head of Experimentation in the Regional Innovation Center is expected to work at UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub and/or Regional Innovation Center (if different). If there is any travel, the mission would be agreed with supervisor in advance and the travel cost would be at actual as in line with UNDP policy.

Competencies

Corporate Competencies:

• Demonstrates integrity by modelling the UN’s values and ethical standards;
• Promotes the vision, mission, and strategic goals of UNDP;
• Displays cultural, gender, religion, race, nationality and age sensitivity and adaptability;
• Treats all people fairly without favouritism.

Technical Competencies:

• Analytic capacity and demonstrated ability to process, analyse and synthesise complex, technical information;
• Proven ability to support the development of high quality knowledge and training materials, and to train technical teams;
• Proven experience in the developing country context and working in different cultural settings.

Communication:

• Communicate effectively in writing to a varied and broad audience in a simple and concise manner.

Professionalism:

• Capable of working in a high pressure environment with sharp and frequent deadlines, managing many tasks simultaneously;
• Excellent analytical and organizational skills.

Teamwork:

• Projects a positive image and is ready to take on a wide range of tasks;
• Focuses on results for the client;
• Welcomes constructive feedback.

Required Skills and Experience

Education:

• Minimum Master’s degree or higher in Business Administration, Public Administration, Economics, Social Science, International Relations, International Development or related fields;

Experience:

• A minimum of 5 years of professional experience in development programming or policy and social innovation. Previous working experience in Asia and the Pacific is an asset;
• Proven professional knowledge and experience in social innovation approaches such as human-centred design, behavioral insights, qualitative and quantitative user research, experiment design & validation, ethnographic research, and impact evaluation;
• Demonstrated ability to work with clients to help surface unarticulated needs;
• Demonstrated ability to apply a portfolio logic to experiments;
• Demonstrate ability to design experiments, validate hypotheses and test the prototypes;
• Demonstrated ability in running co-design session and capacity-building in experimental design, lean iteration and impact evaluation.

Language:

• Excellent written and spoken English required

Competencies:

• Demonstrated commitment to UN’s mission, vision and values;
• Demonstrated sound judgement, diplomacy and sensitivity to confidential matters;
• Demonstrated ability to meet deadlines and work under pressure;
• Innovative thinking, good coordination, organizational skills, and teamwork;
• Open, action-oriented and risk-taking mindset and eager to learn;
• Respect for individuals, gender, and cultural differences.

Price Proposal and Schedule of Payment :

Consultant must submit a financial proposal based on daily fee. Consultant shall quote an “all-inclusive[1]” daily fee for the contract period. IC Time Sheets must be submitted by the Contractor, duly approved by the Individual Contractor’s supervisor, which shall serve as the basis for the payment of fees.

In general, UNDP shall not accept travel costs exceeding those of an economy class ticket. Should the IC wish to travel on a higher class he/she should do so using their own resources

In the event of unforeseeable travel not anticipated in this TOR, payment of travel costs including tickets, lodging and terminal expenses should be agreed upon, between the respective business unit and the Individual Consultant, prior to travel and will be reimbursed.

Travel costs shall be reimbursed at actual but not exceeding the quotation from UNDP approved travel agent.  The provided living allowance will not be exceeding UNDP Living Allowance rates.

Criteria for Selection of the Best Offer:

Individual consultants will be evaluated based on the following methodology, Cumulative analysis

The award of the contract shall be made the individual consultant whose offer has been evaluated and determined as a) responsive/compliant/acceptable; and b) having received the highest score out of set of weighted technical criteria (70%) and financial criteria (30%).

Technical Criteria for Evaluation (Maximum 70 points)

• Criteria A: Education (max 5 points)
• Criteria B: Proven professional experience in development programming or policy and social innovation (max 10 points)
• Criteria C: Proven professional knowledge and experience in social innovation approaches such as design thinking, systems mapping, qualitative and quantitative user research, experiment design & validation, ethnographic research, and impact evaluation (max 10 points)
• Criteria D: Assessment of methodology in the technical proposal which should demonstrate the capacity to identify systemic natures of development challenges and design portfolios of strategic options for experimentation (max 35 points).
• Criteria E: Demonstrated capacity in running co-design session and capacity-building training on portfolio sensemaking and portfolio design/experiment design (max 10 points).

Only candidates obtaining a minimum of 70% of the total technical points would be considered for the Financial Evaluation. Shortlisted candidates shall be called for an interview which will be used to confirm and/or adjust the technical scores awarded based on documentation submitted.

Financial Criteria for Evaluation (Maximum 30 points)

Financial score shall be computed as a ratio of the proposal being evaluated and the lowest priced proposal received by UNDP for the assignment.

Documents to be included when submitting the proposals:

Candidates wishing to be considered for this assignment are required to submit the following documents to demonstrate their qualifications. Please group them into one (1) single PDF document/ or one ZIP File as the application only allows to upload maximum one document:

1. Duly accomplished Letter of Confirmation of Interest and Availability using the template provided by UNDP;
2. Personal CV, indicating all past experience from similar projects, as well as the contact details (email and telephone number) of the Candidate and at least three (3) professional references;
3. Financial Proposal that indicates the all-inclusive fixed total contract price, supported by a breakdown of costs, as per template provided;
4. Technical proposal, including a) a brief description of why the individual considers him/herself as the most suitable for the assignment; and b) a methodology, on how they will approach and complete the assignment.

             

Incomplete proposals may not be considered. The short-listed candidates may be contacted and the successful candidate will be notified.

ANNEXES

Annex I - General Condition of Contract

Annex II- TOR_ Head of Experimentation, Bangkok Regional Innovation Centre

Annex III - Offerors Letter to UNDP Confirming Interest and Availability and Financial Proposal

All documents can be downloaded at : http://procurement-notices.undp.org/view_notice.cfm?notice_id=59221

[1] The term “All inclusive” implies that all costs (professional fees, travel costs, living allowances, communications, consummables, etc.) that could possibly be incurred by the Contractor are already factored into the final amounts submitted in the proposal