The Innovation Fallacy, Part 2
Previously I laid out my position that the humanitarian community is not good at successful innovation, and asked the question – why not? You won’t be surprised to learn that I have a theory about that. The theory depends on you accepting my assumption that innovation doesn’t happen in isolation – it requires a supporting framework to enable it. The stereotype of the mad scientist toiling away in his isolated laboratory is almost entirely inaccurate – somebody has to pay the electricity bills for that lab.
So where does innovation happen in the humanitarian community? I would argue that it happens primarily at the coalface of humanitarian action, where the rubber meets the road. Emergency situations are like 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 – an internal tension that I think serves as the motor for innovation.
If I have such faith in innovation in the field, why do I argue that we’re not good at innovation? Well, we’re not good at successful innovation – taking the experimentation in 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 – the “pollinator” is a key figure – but it does mean that, unless that innovation is adopted more widely, it’s limited to the places where that pollinator lands (and possibly doesn’t survive after they take off again). As Michael pointed out in the comments to the previous post, this is one area where our staffing patterns really cripple us – staff turnover is high and institutional memory is poor.
And it’s those staffing patterns that reveal the wider problem in the sector, the one that really prevents successful innovation. I mentioned that the stereotype of the lone inventor really isn’t very accurate at all1 and that any invention or innovation needs a supporting framework in order to make it successful. This is what’s missing in the humanitarian sector – the elements of that framework.
This means that innovation frequently withers on the vine. Now 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).
What does that framework provide? It 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 – staff turnover is only one symptom of that, but there are many others. I think people glimpsed what might be possible with all the excess funding from the tsunami, but cash alone is not the key to success here.
Unless we can create more cohesion both vertically (from field to HQ) and horizontally (between organisations), our innovations will never be that successful. Oh, we’ll get one or two hits – but we need more if we’re going to be able to meet the challenges of the new century, because they’re not the challenges that we’re used to.2 In the next post, I’m going to look at how we might achieve that – using the tools that have been provided by the information revolution, and illustrated by the projects that I’ve been involved with.
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- And you’ll be glad to know that Malcolm Gladwell agrees with me, for what that’s worth. [↩]
- As our panicked response to rising food costs has shown… [↩]
I’m not sure that institutional memory and staff turnover are the key limiting factors here. In fact institutional memory can stifle innovation…’this is the way we do things here, its the way we have always done it.’
Other factors may have greater impact. Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome is common, especially amongst national staff. I’ve been told more often than I would like by national staff “That won’t work here… we are different… the context is different… we are not [insert country or region of choice here]“.
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. How many organizations are comfortable with risking donor money on ideas that have a high risk of failure? When was the last time you saw an organizational document titled “Woohoo! Our Project Failed! – Now we know one more thing that doesn’t work”?
Kevin Toomer
25 Nov 08 at 18:13
You’re right – the staffing issue is only one of many. You’ve also pre-empted my third post – learning from failure is a critical ingredient that we’re missing, let alone embracing failure as an opportunity to learn. There’s a very basic reason for that built into the system, which I’ll talk about in a later post. Any suggestions on how to overcome that fear of failure are welcome, of course!
Paul Currion
25 Nov 08 at 18:49
There appears to be little profit motive (financial) for innovation in the humanitarian sector. See this piece by Benetech’s CEO on “Developing ICT for Social Need” published last month:
http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/developing-ict
Patrick Meier
26 Nov 08 at 5:57
I have mixed feelings about the role of finance in innovation; in humanitarian response, the profit motive is quite weak but things still get done. A lot of innovation is not financially motivated, although almost all successful innovation requires a financial component.
Thanks for the ref to the Jim Fruchterman article, although the irony of it being stuck behind a pay barrier made me smile
. Benetech clearly smuggle in some assumptions – “market failure” – but the criteria for investment are interesting.
Paul Currion
26 Nov 08 at 7:16
The Not Invented Here syndrome is a problem, but in my experienced this can be caused by national staff (correctly) been skeptical of expats flying in with “solutions”, without taking the time to understand the context, or at least trying to give the staff a sense of ownership of the “solution” which ultimately they will be left using.
This skepticism is when within months/years another expat flies in with a different “solution” to the same problem!
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.
Currently all the interaction I have with head office and field offices in different countries has been based on personal relationships with people I have met. I do think that INGOs could do a better job of connecting their staff around the globe.
Michael Howden
26 Nov 08 at 13:39
Michael – you are absolutely right about the need for better connections between staff, the vertical and horizontal connections that I mentioned in the post. In particular I feel strongly that connections between national staff are completely neglected and in some cases discouraged – despite the fact that national staff are the backbone of the organisation, and the key to the “ownership” that you talked about.
Paul Currion
26 Nov 08 at 13:46
http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/05/disastertech-jesse-robbins-mikel-maron-where20.html
In Jesse’s and my simple pattern, the key component is a “champion”, to promote and usher through innovation until its picked up by organizational DNA. This is a very individualistic notion, and codifying into an institutional practice may be difficult, except for hiring creative free thinkers into organizations and giving them the freedom to pursue new ideas.
Perhaps pursuing innovation within organizations from the start is the barrier. Innovation is happening outside traditional structures, where those creative types can act as individuals, collectively .. in open source projects, mailing lists, unconferences. The loose network of creative technological humanitarians is growing, and growing more exposed. We can concentrate our efforts there for now, to the point where they can’t be ignored.
Mikel Maron
30 Nov 08 at 16:15
[...] bring them on board or get around them if necessary? [And along with that you can add the general reluctance to embrace [...]
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