The Innovation Fallacy, Part 5

In the last post in this series, many moons ago, I listed five practitioner-based approaches to successful innovation – but are there any concrete examples of innovation? In the first post in the series, I said that I’ve been involved in at least five projects that I believe demonstrate innovation in the sector, and regular readers of this blog will recognise most of these names. Naturally these projects generally involve technology, but that’s not what makes them innovative – so what does?

Humanitarian Information Centres.The original concept of the HICs was that they were a field-based focal point to deliver a range of information services, especially introducing Geographic Information Systems to actors in the field. While the Kosovo HCIC wasn’t the first information centre, the HCIC’s innovation was to package this delivery in a coherent way yet still serve people at different levels – from individual refugees to UNMIK. The HICs in general started to fail as soon as they lost sight of that, in my opinion.

NetHope. In their own words, NetHope is a “nonprofit IT consortium of leading international NGOs”, but their innovation is in their approach – creating “the ability to collectively solve common problems and leverage their technology investment to achieve higher levels of efficiency, quality and reach for their organizations’ programs so that communities in need can be better served.” What this means in practice is sharing the burden of e.g. testing and deploying new communications equipment, leveraging economies of scale to get better deals on hardware and software, and – perhaps most importantly – encouraging open discussion about how to solve common organisational IT problems. This works because IT departments are non-competitive – unlike Programme Units, they are not competing with each other for funding – and because IT staff are often isolated within their own organisations. NetHope’s innovation was to create the space for these people to network with each other – everything else is built on that.

Sahana. As everybody should know by now, Sahana is an open source platform for disaster management, originally intended to enable developing countries and organizations to manage disasters more effectively but now seeing wider application (for example, it’s being used by organisations as diverse as New York City Council, Huridocs and Uncle Tom Cobbley) despite the serious limitations of open source as a model for crisis response. Sahana’s innovation was to harness the open source model to the needs of humanitarian response – a natural fit, in my opinion.

Aid Workers Network. Still crazy after all these year, AWN is a web-based community of practice to enable aid workers to share expertise. This project has never had it easy – Mark Hammersley was frankly way ahead of his time, and many of the principles that he espoused when developing the project are now commonplace in the sector.¹ AWN’s innovation was to use the web to connect aid workers, the most geographically and culturally diverse professional group that has ever existed – a similar principle to NetHope but a completely different approach. AWN has never taken off the way that it should have – not due to the technology, but due to the inability of its guiding committee to market the service successfully.

I’d be interested to hear whether people think I’m wrong, but it should be obvious that I don’t think that any of this innovation was technology innovation. In fact none of these projects were technologically innovative in themselves – their innovations were introducing or applying existing technology and techniques for the benefit of the sector. Looking back on these projects, the common denominator that made each of them more or less successful was their construction and use of networks amongst their target market. It was this network – whether more or less formal, composed of individuals or organisations – that made it possible for their impact to spread through the sector – in other words, to become both enduring and widespread.

However as soon as that focus on or leverage of networks lapses, success starts to disappear. For my money, we can see this most clearly with the HICs – as their focus shifted from supporting the entire humanitarian community to supporting OCHA and/or the Humanitarian Co-ordinator’s office, they gradually found it more difficult to be able to leverage network effects to act as an information broker. Without that role, it was increasingly unclear what their added value was to the bumanitarian community, at the same time as other actors were starting to provide similar services (notably GIS). OCHA, meanwhile, mistakenly assumed that it was the technology that was the innovation – in fact, that it was the technology that drew people to the project in the first place, which I would contest vigorously.

However what made it possible for each of these projects to create their networks in the first place was technology – and it is here that the humanitarian community needs to focus if it is to innovate successfully in future. Technology has created the possibility of overcoming many of the organisational problems that plague the sector, from organisational silos to staff turnover to insecurity in the field.² It is not that technology will solve these problems, but it does offer us the possibility of working together more effectively to solve them ourselves.

1. Although those principles are honoured more in the breach than in the observation. [↩]
2. It is worth noting that these issues need to be addressed on their own terms as well, and that some initiatives are already trying to do that. Collaborative efforts such as the Emergency Capacity Building Project (http://www.ecbproject.org) and UNGIWG (http://www.ungiwg.org/unsdi.htm) are two that are relevant here. [↩]

Related posts:

1. The Innovation Fallacy, Part 1
2. The Innovation Fallacy, Part 4
3. The Innovation Fallacy, Part 2
4. The Innovation Fallacy, Part 3
5. The Innovation Fallacy Series