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.
- 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… [↩]
