Child Trends Inc.

Innovation Hub Name: Breakthrough Accelerator: Scaling Innovations through Equity-centered Design

Innovation Hub Type: Accelerator 

Project Overview: Child Trends will implement the Breakthrough Accelerator, in partnership with Power to Decide. The mission of the Breakthrough Accelerator is to build the capacity of innovation design teams (IDT) to use equity-focused practices to test, refine, evaluate, and widely implement their innovations. The end goal is that more adolescent sexual and reproductive programs, products and services will be available that are informed and co-designed by the lived experience of the adolescents who will use them.

The project team will track and measure the movement of six to eight IDTs per cohort through the innovation sequence. In addition to capacity-building and evaluation support provided to the IDTs, the partners will develop and implement an ambitious learning agenda to ensure that they consistently examine, improve, and amplify the innovations of the hub. The Breakthrough Accelerator will have two tracks - commercialization and evaluation. The commercialization track will be for IDTs that want to establish their innovation as a best practice, and the evaluation track will be for IDTs that want to move toward conducting a rigorous evaluation with the goal of becoming evidence based.

Anticipated total number of Innovation Development Teams (IDTs) to be supported through the project: Six to eight IDTs per cohort (4 cohorts in the project).