Don Barger for Innovation Fund Recipient Video

Speaker: Don Barger, Director of Innovation and AI, International Mission Board

Don Barger: The ultimate difference we hope this project makes is allowing us to engage more people with the gospel.

Don Barger: Thank you so much for the innovation gift, uh, for the International mission board. I'm Don Barger. I'm the director of innovation and artificial intelligence for the IMB and this is Jacob Boss. He's the vice president of Global Engagement. It's such an honor and privilege to receive this award, and as we look out as the IMB in the world today, there's just so much opportunity, but we realize that this opportunity is not gonna be fully realized unless there's a significant amount of innovation. This award is gonna help us as we continue to strive towards effective innovation so we can see the nations engaged with the gospel. This award allows us to kickstart our innovation incubator for the IMB.

Don Barger: We realized that many organizations have innovation incubators. We didn't invent this concept, but it is new to the IMB. As a 175 year old organization, an innovation incubator will help us take the next steps to effectively engage the future even as we praise God for what He has done in our past. Yeah, so in our first round, uh, participants in our incubator, we, we've already actually begun their work and I want to share the story of two of these teams. One of these teams will be working on innovative ways to re-engage into a very large closed country that we've had limited access, limited presence and it's a, a very large unreached, um, country, and without getting into many of the details, incubators already helped that team refine that strategy. And do some trials. Uh, another team that we're working with, uh, works with our disaster and human needs efforts, and this team will refine their strategy even further to create new ways to provide relief in areas, uh, sometimes have very difficult access to, um, for our personnel and for other people to get in. And so we will be able to help those teams, uh, access and give assistance in uh very closed countries.

Don Barger: You know that in organizations that have been around for a long time, sometimes it's really hard to create new ideas and perhaps the biggest innovation is that we are encouraging innovation and this is somewhat of a shift in our strategy. Too often organizations are set up where the default answer is just no to any outside of the box thinking. The seed money from MO Nexus grant has helped us gain traction in showing people that innovation is not just accepted, it's expected and encouraged. Yeah, this approach is giving us access to countries and people groups we've lost access to, but it's also giving us a space to try some things. And the reality is, even if these things don't all work, it gives us the opportunity to celebrate the learning that takes place and the process by which it happens. This may not actually sound like a big accomplishment for small startups, but for large organizations that have a lot of history, having a space for innovation is essential.

Don Barger: The ultimate difference we hope this project makes is allowing us to engage more people with the gospel. We realize that in the world today, it's been the introduction of technology over the last 25 years, the fruit of globalization has introduced new forms of communication. It's also introduced new ways that people process information. And the, the reality is this provides new distribution channels, new ways for people to access the gospel unless we have innovative processes, we won't get there. Yeah, from an organizational standpoint, we want to see an innovation of a culture of innovation permeate everything we do from how we do HR and logistics to how we play our part in taking the gospel to the last peoples. We want to see that innovation is a part of that process from the very beginning.