Event Summary | Spillover-Innovation Learning Journey Hive #1

On June 2nd, 2026, the Beyond Lab at UN Geneva kicked off a new kind of collaboration, one that would have to reflect the nuanced, honest, and co-creative collaboration structure needed to address a topic as complex as spillovers. This collaboration would need to transform strategy into action.

What are spillovers?

Spillover effects are the positive or negative impacts that national policies have across borders, and they are a critical yet often overlooked dimension of long-term sustainable development.

For a long time, the Beyond Lab has asked: 

How can the Lab leverage its UN platform and its multi-stakeholder relationships across public and private sectors to strengthen resilience today, accelerate progress on the 2030 Agenda, and pave the way for transformative systems thinking beyond 2030?

The Spillover-Innovation Learning Journey is now piloting an innovative peer-to-peer learning architecture to address these questions and to center, at its heart, the UN 2.0 principles of a more modern, collaborative, and integrated UN.

What's innovative about this learning architecture?

The Spillover-Innovation Learning Journey is structured around a peer-to-peer learning architecture with two prongs: the first is designed as a "Hive" and the second is designed as a "Pod."

Hives build collective understanding

Hive sessions are international. They center the power of collective intelligence. They aim to establish a common analytical foundation and shared language to anchor the Learning Journey.

Hives gather cross-sector representatives from all of the nations participating in the pilot, as well as hosts and invited experts, to:

• Build a shared understanding of spillover effects as systemic, cross-border phenomena
• Introduce innovative concepts, tools, and analytical lenses relevant to spillovers and sustainable development
• Enable cross-country and cross-sector dialogue, highlighting interdependencies, tensions, and leverage points
• Support collective reflection on how national policies shape regional and global outcomes

Pods center contextual application

Pod sessions are national. They center the power of insights that come from context-specific application. Pods serve as smaller, protected learning spaces where participants can experiment with ideas, reflect on challenges, and learn from peers within their own national context to then implement concrete actions.

Pods gather peer groups across sectors within a given nation to very tangibly:

• Translate collective insights from the Hives into context-specific understanding
• Enable trust-based, candid peer exchange about implementation within countries and across institutions
• Explore real policy dilemmas, trade-offs, and constraints related to spillover effects
• Co-develop practical approaches, ideas, or directions for integrating spillover awareness into policy processes

Hives and pods form part of an iterative feedback loop, with a hive happening each week and Pod sessions braiding themselves in between each Hive gathering.

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Recapping Hive #1

Why is spillover innovation important, and why now?

Addressing the cross-cutting global issue of spillovers has transformative potential. Across collaborators who shared during Hive #1, the following themes emerged:

• Spillovers are not abstract; they are already part of day-to-day policy realities and shape the outcomes of sustainable development across borders.
• National action has global consequences, both positive and negative. This makes spillover awareness essential for credible and coherent SDG implementation. 
• If unmanaged, spillovers can undermine progress, but if addressed intentionally, they can become a systemic lever of innovation, policy coherence, and shared gains.

Spillover innovation cannot happen alone

Addressing spillovers requires a whole-of-society approach that involves governments, UN actors, the private sector, academia, and civil society. This Spillover-Innovation Learning Journey is designed as a practical space to bring actors across these spaces together, to experiment, exchange, and translate learning into action, as a support to existing work.

We extend our deep gratitude to each Pod Host for bringing together the national pods; to the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) for making this work possible; to our partners at the UN Innovation Network (UNIN), the UN Development Coordination Office (DCO), and Huddlecraft, a peer-to-peer expert facilitator; and, of course, to Germany, India, Pakistan, and Turkey, for being the inaugural Pods to participate in this pilot iteration.

Looking ahead

Hive #2 opens the floor to different understandings of spillovers in order to converge around a shared frame of reference and common language as a foundation for moving forward. We are very grateful to welcome guest input by the OECD on defining spillovers and input from our Pod collaborators in India on contextual applications, opening the dialogues of Hive #2 and Pods #2.

You can stay tuned for the highlights that emerge from the next Hive session by following the Beyond Lab on LinkedIn.

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