Developmental evaluation (DE), when used to support innovation, is about weaving design with data and strategy. It’s about taking a systematic, structured approach to paying attention to what you’re doing, what is being produced (and how), and anchoring it to why you’re doing it by using monitoring and evaluation data. For innovators, this is all connected through design.

DE helps to identify potentially promising practices or products and guide the strategic decision-making process that comes with innovation and provides evidence to support the innovation process from ideation through to business model execution and product delivery.

As introduced over on Censemaking, DE is also filled with traps. 

Over the next couple weeks, we’ll be providing some guidance on how to navigate these traps and what your organization can do to steer clear of them and harness the great potential of this important approach to innovation strategy and evaluation for your organization.

Image credit: 200 pair telephone cable model of corpus callosum by J Brew used under Creative Commons license