SUBMITTED (to the Private Sector Development Blog of the World Bank( BY NIGEL TWOSE, CO-AUTHOR: JODI NELSON ON MON, 2011-09-19 18:59

"Firms maximize their profits by developing strategy with targets, tracking progress, and using incentives to drive achievement. Without the natural feedback of the market, how can we use this approach to drive toward results for the poor?

"One of us works for the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – an old school Bretton Woods institution with years of experience building systems to track results across countries. The other one of us works for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an entrepreneurial organization that is much newer on the block, without some of the systems that come with fifty years of development work but also without the preconceptions. We come to the table with a desire to learn from each other’s experience. We hope this first blog will pique input from colleagues around the world, similarly passionate about the power of data to improve our business.

"Our main concern is how to make relevant, credible, transparent and actionable measurement the powerful tool it needs to be in our organizations. We are convinced that private sector practices that link strategy, results, information and performance incentives hold promise, but also aware that there exist significant challenges to successfully using them. In our two very different institutions, we grapple with three similar questions about how to resolve this tension. "