This is probably as well since not everyone can be an innovator all the time, and as you point out there are diminishing returns on copycatting. It might also be in some cases that innovators are not good distributors and so optimisers and copycatters play an important role in widely disseminating a new idea.

I would imagine this isn’t too different in development where there are pioneers who develop new approaches, then other organizations (quite possibly large more bureaucratic aid organizations) that thrive more by either adapting or just copying the innovations of others. But these copiers also play an important role in disseminating and sometimes incrementally improving the approach – but at a certain point there will be diminishing returns once the approach has been widely disseminated and applied. In this case both the innovators and the copiers play a useful role, but which role any individual or institution should take would depend on the situation (which would work best for them in the circumstance they face) and what they are good at.

In the aid world maybe the question is the current environment conducive to allow individual actors to optimize their behaviour in terms of the impact on beneficiaries (or perhaps put differently do the incentives for the main actors align with the best results for beneficiaries or does the lack of good feedback mechanisms mean that the actors might not be achieving the right balance between innovation and imitation in any given circumstance).

1. The ideas are interesting, but meanwhile the main development actors are locking themselves in long term “official views” like Paris, Accra and Busan. Although lip-service is paid to flexibility, in essence a consensus approach can be only rigid. How do you analyse these agreements within your framework? do you hint at these frameworks in point 6? why don’t you say so?
2. Country ownership is indeed problematic. On the one end, because it is the opinion of the powers that be that count, locking in the existing power relations; on the other hand the goal of ” consensus planning” reads very much like conventional wisdom to me. Meaning the conventions of the powers that be, in the North and the South.
3. ” fools rush in” seems to be a bigger problem and sign of naivety than ” first do no harm”. If an actor is not prepared or capable to apply a nimble, evaluative and informed approach, keeping out seems like a better alternative than rushing in with a static one-sided approach e.g. arming the Taliban against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.