The 7 key decisions that shaped our methodology

A blog by Lea Simpson, Founder of Brink, Director of the Frontier Technologies Hub, originally published on Medium in 2017, edited in 2024.

Mastering the build-measure-learn feedback loop is crucial to working in agile ways.

The Frontier Technologies Hub (FT Hub) offers opportunities designed to help FCDO advisors apply frontier technologies to their work.

The FT Hub supports projects with:

1. Money to pilot their ideas

2. Matchmaking with private sector technology partners

3. Support to work in new, agile ways

We’ve made seven key decisions on how to support, measure success and work with each of our projects. This post is the first in a series to lift the lid on the the method that we’ve been using, share some our thinking, artefacts and let you know what we plan on changing as we ramp up to our second call.

1. Blend the best innovation methods and remain agnostic

2. Work in Sprints

3. Embed useful artefacts

4. Treat monitoring, learning and disbursement as the skeleton key to making method work

5. Don’t overwhelm with new language

6. Don’t just manage, coach

7. Eat our own dog food

We invite you to dig into the decisions that interest you the most. We welcome any thoughts or feedback you might have.

---

If you’d like to dig in further…

🎧 Listen to the Data Frontier to hear more about how data is being harnessed for international development and diplomacy (7 episode podcast)

🔮 Explore our Future of Elections learning journey (long read)