Real Innovation Doesn't Happen in the Clouds. It Happens on the Ground.

Picture this: You're sitting in some air-conditioned conference room, and someone's pitching you the next big thing in food security. They've got a slick PowerPoint. They've got numbers that look impressive. They've got funding locked up and a five-year strategic roadmap.

But they've never actually been to the communities they're trying to help.

They've never watched a woman in Peru figure out how to grow food in a shipping container in the urban slums. They've never seen what happens when you bring a high-tech solution to a refugee camp in Algeria and realize that a forty-thousand-dollar system doesn't work when your customers are living on a few dollars a day.

And here's what kills me: Most organizations will keep pushing the high-tech solution anyway. Because they've already committed to it. Because the team's already built it. Because admitting it doesn't work feels like failure.

But there's a different way to think about innovation when the stakes are actually human lives and food security.

I recently talked to Hila Cohen, who helps run the WFP Innovation Accelerator at the United Nations World Food Program. And what's fascinating about how they work is that they've actually figured out something most innovation initiatives never will: How to let real-world constraints completely reshape your solutions instead of fighting against them.

When Your Customer Is Hungry, You Can't Afford To Be Wrong

The WFP operates in 88 countries. They deal with situations most corporations will never touch: conflict zones, climate shocks, refugee camps, desperate hunger. They're not trying to improve engagement metrics or increase market share. They're trying to keep people alive.

And that changes everything about how you approach innovation.

Here's what stuck with me about Hila's approach: They don't fall in love with the technology. They fall in love with the problem. And they'll kill any solution that doesn't work—no matter how much time or money they've invested.

When they started with H2Grow, this hydroponic system for growing food without soil, they thought they had the answer. They brought in these high-tech containers with LED lighting systems, cost about forty grand each. Beautiful engineering. State-of-the-art.

Then they got to Algeria. Refugee camp. The Sahrawi refugees—some of the most desperate people in the world. And they realized something: This forty-thousand-dollar system was never going to scale. You can't ship expensive containers to remote refugee camps and expect them to work. The logistics are impossible. The maintenance is impossible. The cost is impossible.

So what did they do?

They pivoted. They worked with a local team member named Taleb who figured out how to rebuild the same system using locally available materials. No fancy lighting. No imported technology. Just plastic covering, a mud hut, and materials people could actually find and fix on their own.

The new system cost three or four thousand dollars. Maybe one-tenth of the price. And it worked just as well.

That's not compromise. That's not settling for less. That's actually solving the problem better.

The Bridge Between What You Know And What The World Actually Needs

Here's what I think most organizations get wrong about innovation in emerging markets or hard-to-reach communities: They treat it like a charity project or a PR opportunity. Get in, do good, take the photo, move on.

The WFP Innovation Accelerator works differently. They see themselves as a translator. On one side, they understand startups. They know what an MVP is. They know funding rounds and business models and the pressure founders face. On the other side, they understand the brutal reality of operating in 88 countries where a power outage could shut down your operation for a month.

So when a startup comes in with a solution, the accelerator doesn't just say yes or no. They say: "Here's what will work. Here's what won't. Here's who you need to talk to. Here's where your assumptions are wrong."

And critically—they do this work before they even bring you into a formal program.

Hila told me they've received over six thousand applications. They've run more than thirty boot camps. They've funded more than eighty projects. But they're ruthless about matching. Before a startup even gets invited to a boot camp, the team asks a simple question: Is there an actual business unit in one of our 88 countries that would use this? Not "is this cool." Not "could this theoretically help." But "do we have a real person in a real location who needs this badly enough to test it with you."

If the answer is no, you don't get in. Because wasting a startup's time on a solution that nobody wants is worse than saying no from the beginning.

The Learning Happens In The Friction

The one thing that really got me about how they measure success is that they don't measure it the way most innovation teams do. They don't count ideas. They don't count workshops. They don't count how many startups pitched.

They count impact on human lives.

With the Building Blocks project—a blockchain-based cash transfer system—they started tiny. One hundred people in Pakistan. Just to see if it would work. Then they scaled to Jordan with ten thousand refugees. Then a hundred thousand. Now they're at three to four hundred thousand people in refugee camps across Cox Bazaar in Bangladesh and beyond.

Each scale required learning. Each stage revealed assumptions that were wrong. And they were willing to pivot or slow down or even kill it if the learning showed they were headed in the wrong direction.

But here's what makes this work: They built trust. The people they work with know that the WFP is going to listen. They know it's not just a pilot project designed to make headquarters feel good. It's a real commitment to solving a real problem.

That trust doesn't come from mission statements or values documents. It comes from showing up, listening, adjusting when things don't work, and proving that human lives matter more than project timelines.

Why This Matters (Even If You're Not Saving Lives)

You're probably not going to build a 300,000-person humanitarian program. Most people won't. But the principles here translate to any innovation work in any environment where real constraints matter.

First: Stop confusing your hypothesis with the solution. If you think people need X, go find people who are actually desperate for X. And be prepared for them to tell you they need Y instead. Then build Y.

Second: Local knowledge matters more than corporate knowledge. The person on the ground who's been dealing with this problem for five years understands it better than your strategy team. Listen to them. Especially when they tell you your solution won't work.

Third: Scale is a feature, not a bug. If something doesn't scale, it's not just a constraint. It's probably telling you something fundamental about whether the solution actually solves the problem. A high-cost solution only works if people can pay for it.

Fourth: Champions matter more than committees. The wfp doesn't decide what gets scaled by having meetings. They find the people who are obsessed with making something work, and they give those people space and resources and support. Then they get the hell out of the way.

The Uncomfortable Part

Here's what nobody wants to admit: Real innovation, the kind that actually changes lives, requires accepting a lot of failure and a lot of inefficiency. You're going to fund projects that don't work. You're going to pilot things that fail. You're going to discover that your expensive solution doesn't work and you have to rebuild it from scratch using cheaper materials.

Most organizations don't have the stomach for that. They want innovation that feels like success. That looks good on the PowerPoint. That doesn't require admitting you were wrong.

But if you're serious about solving actual problems for actual people, you have to be willing to be wrong. Publicly. Repeatedly. And then you have to learn and adjust and try again.

The WFP does this because the alternative—playing it safe, sticking with what works, not experimenting—means people stay hungry. That's the forcing function that makes them willing to accept the messiness of real innovation.

Most corporate innovation teams don't have that forcing function. And so they keep shipping solutions that look good in theory but don't work in the real world.

---

Want The Full Story?

Listen to Yaniv Corem's full conversation with Hila Cohen on The School of Innovation podcast. It's a masterclass in how to build an innovation accelerator that doesn't just look good—it actually feeds people.

Because here's the thing about real innovation: It's not about having the best idea. It's about having the willingness to get your hands dirty, admit when you're wrong, listen to the people you're trying to help, and do the actual work of making something better.

Everything else is just noise.