And Now Presenting Paul Currion: The Innovation Fallacy

Paul Currion at humanitarian.info has published a fascinating series on innovation in the humanitarian sector - you can access parts 1-4 here, and part 5 here.

Below is a short summary.

A Beginner's Guide to Innovation in the Humanitarian Sector

There's a broad agreement that in the twenty-first century (C21) the humanitarian community is facing a new set of challenges that don't look much like the twentieth (C20), when the sector was growing up - but it seems to be business as usual for most organisations. In a series of blog posts, I expressed my concern that the humanitarian community simply isn't very good at innovation, at a time when we need to be encouraging it more than ever.

I should qualify that. The humanitarian community is built on innovation - a virtue born of the necessity of just getting things done despite a lack of resources - but successful innovation is very hard to come by. I define “successful” in this context as innovations that become widespread and enduring - that is, that they spread widely and last over time. These two qualifications makes successful innovation sometimes hard to identify - but not impossible.

My assumption is that innovation doesn’t happen in isolation - it requires a supporting framework to enable it. I would argue that innovation in the humanitarian community happens primarily in emergency situations in the field - real-time laboratories where the resources are limited and the stakes are high. At the same time as being unwilling to risk the lives of affected communities and individuals, humanitarian practitioners are prepared to try anything to save those lives.

How do I reconcile this with my argument that we’re not good at innovation? Well, we’re not good at successful innovation - taking that experimentation from the field and replicating it over distance and time.

What tends to happen is that an individual practitioner will move to a new position and/or a new location, and take any innovations they’ve been involved with along. Now this model of spreading innovation is fine, but it does mean that, unless that innovation is adopted more widely, it’s limited to the places where that individual lands (and possibly doesn’t survive after they take off again).

Any invention or innovation needs a supporting framework in order to make it successful, and this is what’s missing in the humanitarian sector - so much innovation withers on the vine. I wouldn’t argue that other sectors have perfected the art of cultivating innovation, but they’re certainly far ahead in terms of creating those frameworks. In the medical sector, for example, innovation is formalised and embedded outside the practice of medicine, through a combination network of public (such as research and university hospitals) and private vehicles (such as pharmaceutical companies).

That framework creates the possibility of creating a “chain of value”, which is the key to successful innovation, where each link in the chain adds value to the initial innovation and has a stake in ensuring its success. With our fragmented sector, we simply don’t have the possibility to do this- but unless we can create more cohesion both vertically (from field to HQ) and horizontally (between organisations), our innovations will never be that successful.

Based on comments received on my blog, I developed some starting points based on practitioner experience. None of them are guaranteed to work, but all of them are realistic:

1. Overcome fear. “Many humanitarian organizations, especially larger NGOs and the UN, fail to embrace failure. Innovation requires a willingness to fail, perhaps repeatedly. For every successful innovation there are numerous failures… People who are afraid to fail don’t innovate.” - Kevin Toomer

2. Create incentives. “A recognition of innovation as necessary, worth sharing, celebrating. Spectacularly hard when it’s really the grinding day-to-day of just getting stuff done or just surviving that’s most aid work, let alone the brick-wall-headbutting of preparedness in and by local communities.” - Nigel Snoad

3. Look out! “Innovation is happening outside traditional structures, where those creative types can act as individuals, collectively .. in open source projects, mailing lists, unconferences... We can concentrate our efforts there for now, to the point where they can’t be ignored.” - Mikel Maron.

(However bear in mind that “Folks that haven’t spent time in the field have a very hard time understanding the nuances so they develop solutions that will never hold up. They waste all of our time chasing ghosts and fixing things that they think need fixing.” - Jon Thompson)

4. Only Connect. “I agree that the answers lies in better connections between field offices and head offices, among organizations AND ALSO between different field offices. I think that head offices could play a better role in facilitating the transfer of solutions between field offices.” -  Michael Howden

5. Technology > Network. “I’ve been involved with a number of projects that demonstrate innovation... all of them relied on network effects to create the value that make their innovation more or less successful… What made it possible for each of them to create those networks in the first place was technology, creating the possibility of overcoming many of the organisational problems that plague the sector” - Paul Currion

The question is, how do we implement these in our own organisations, and spread them across the sector? Approaches will vary from organisation to organisation, location to location - but we need to get the message out there, otherwise the traditional humanitarian sector might not survive.

[Cartoon from the New Yorker - at least I believe so]