humanitarian.info

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. [↩]

Attributed to Abraham Maslow (albeit possibly apocryphally):

When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.

Which leads us to Cory Doctorow:

Poverty and its associated problems – hunger, poor health, lack of education and disenfranchisement – are fundamentally information problems.

Embarrassing for everybody. And he got paid for it, as well.

A while back, the Economist set up Project Red Stripe, an attempt to incubate innovation within the Economist group. It was an unmitigated failure, having developed one substantial (although misguided) idea and then imploded after 6 months. But as we’ve already established, failure is nothing to be scared of and something to be learned from. Sure enough, the elves at the Economist Andrew Carey at Triarchy Press wrote a book about it, which he also made available on a book blog, if you don’t want to shell out cold hard cash in these recessionary times.

You can also download an internal note (PDF) which gives you the basics. Not all of their points are strictly relevant to your average NGO – they’re particularly interested in the dynamics of small teams within an organisation – but there’s some useful stuff in there even if you disagree with their points:

1. Have a strategy for team selection
2. Be open at your peril
3. People shouldn’t own ideas
4. Agree a single outcome
5. Don’t try to produce a business plan
6. Understand the trade-offs with verification
7. Talk to people outside the team

If you want to read something more substantial but still free, innovation guru Frans Johansson has made his book The Medici Effect (PDF) available as a free PDF (which might have cost him money but is clearly valuable in reputational terms – I applaud him). Johansson takes entire chapters to say what could be said in a paragraph, but the book is well-written and engaging. His key insight is that innovation is more likely to happen at the intersection of different cultures, where the number of possible combinations of ideas rises exponentially. That sounds like the humanitarian sector to me – so where’s the innovation that should be exploding in our offices?

If anybody has any links to other useful resources on innovation, feel free to leave them in the comments.

UPDATE: Thanks to Andrew Carey for correcting the inaccuracies in my original post.

I promised Lorant Czaran¹ that I would post something about ReliefWeb’s job vacancies mash-up – and then realised that it would fit perfectly with this discussion about innovation. I’ve written about ReliefWeb before, but it’s not exactly noted for cutting edge web 2.0 efforts. However, no matter what its faults, it’s the single most important website for the humanitarian community, which is why it’s good to see them trying some new approaches.

I’m not claiming that searching for jobs on ReliefWeb is an especially humanitarian activity, but it is an activity that a lot of humanitarians do. One of the things that I completely failed to understand about their redesign a a couple of years ago is why they relegated the Vacancies section to the bottom of the “Professional Resources” part of the site, rather than foregrounding it. The reason for foregrounding? Simply that vacancies are one of the main reasons that people go to the site in the first place.

Vacancies shouldn’t be the focus of the entire site, but they should be a focus of the user experience. Lorant and his team took a strong step forward here, introducing a new way of interacting with the site – a Google Maps mash-up which can also be downloaded as a Google Earth KML file. This is a great idea, and well executed, given ReliefWeb’s disturbingly 90s website design – but why does this fit with the innovation theme? AFter all, Google Map mash-ups aren’t exactly new, even in the humanitarian sector.

What’s innovative about it is that it shows the way forward not just for job searches but for the entire ReliefWeb site. There’s no reason why the enitire site couldn’t be organised in this way, with navigation based entirely on geography – after all, that’s the way the humanitarian community itself works. I’d love to see this approach extended to become the front page of the website, offering a way into the main Countries and Emergencies section. There’s very few parts of the site that don’t offer themselves up to a geospatial interface.

So what about those few parts that don’t – Policy and Issues, for example? Well you couldn’t do a Google Maps mash-up for those things – but why couldn’t you do a policy map instead, showing the different links between sectors and institutions? Or a tag cloud approach, showing which issues are the ones that are generating the most publications and discussion? Either of these would offer a better user experience that would make ReliefWeb not just important but innovative as well….

1. Ex-ReliefWeb, now UN-Spider, which is the most awesomest UN acronym ever, by the way [↩]

Innovation! I’ve been writing and you’ve been reading (and occasionally commenting):

Part 1: What is innovation in the humanitarian sector?

Part 2: Why is innovation in the sector unsuccessful?

Part 3: Is innovation always a good thing?¹

Interlude 1: Why are there so many questions about innovation?

Interlude 2: Are we really talking about the same innovation?

Part 4: So how do we successfully innovate?

Also available shortly: Growing Innovation in a Networked Garden, in the Peace IT! newsletter.

1. Short answer: No. [↩]

I promised in the last post that I would present some suggestions that have come out of reader comments as to how the humanitarian community might generate more successful innovation. Bear in mind that I’m not promising that any of these suggestions are guaranteed to work – they’re not – or that, if they do work, they’lll be spectacularly successful.

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. They follow the rules. They preserve the status quo. The bosses who brought the best out in me were the ones who let me take risks and even fail. They didn’t punish failures other than those that were due to negligence.” – Kevin Toomer
2. Create incentives. “So, how do we know what we know and judge it, use it, teach it, reward it? Paul (and the comments/replies) wrote a whole lot about that, but some of this comes down to simple professionalism/best practice (which sometimes goes AWOL on an institutional level particularly) and some of it is that we do need a cultural change. 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! “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. 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. In the mean time all we can do is watch them run around in circles.” – 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. 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
5. Technology > Network. “I’ve been involved with a number of projects that demonstrate innovation, all focused on introducing new technology to the sector, with varying degrees of success. None of these projects were technologically innovative themselves – their innovation was in using existing technology more effectively for the benefit of the sector – and all of them relied on network effects to create the value that make their innovation more or less successful. As soon as their focus on or their leverage from networks lapses, their success starts to disappear… 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, from organisational silos to staff turnover to insecurity in the field. 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.” – Paul Currion

So there’s a starting point based on actual practitioner experience. All of these recommendations are realistic, and can already be found in various organisations, so the question then becomes – how do we implement them in our own organisations, and spread them across the sector? Approaches will vary from organisation to organisation, location to location – but in 2009 we’d better get the message out there, because otherwise the traditional humanitarian sector is going to be left behind.

I’ve already talked about how we need our innovation to be enduring and widespread, and how existing measures of innovation might not be especially useful. I haven’t said anything about what I consider to be innovation – and that’s probably because innovation is a lot like hard-core pornography, as per the words of Justice Potter Stewart:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

WIth that linkbait out of the way, and courtesy of JRA, I would present an example of what I would consider innovation. This BBC feature shows the guys that you find everywhere, not just in the ranks of Nigeria’s Repairmen – they’re the people who keep the buses running in Afghanistan, the tractors moving in Cambodia, and my car running in Montenegro.

Now, if you don’t think that what these guys do qualifies as innovation, might I suggest that you are thinking about innovation in entirely the wrong terms? Does innovation mean exciting new technology, or does it mean applying ingenuity to everyday problems? And as JRA asks, how do we harness that ingenuity more effectively? All thoughts welcome…

In fact, the world still looks to the United States for innovation. In a recent survey of venture capitalists completed by Deloitte, no other other country in the world even came close to being the world’s leader in innovation.

1. A “survey of venture capitalists”? I imagine that they would be drawing on a very specific definition of “innovation”, one that might not bear any resemblance to the actual definition – and does this mean that where there are no venture capitalists, there is no innovation?
2. It’s obvious that innovation is linked closely to particular political, economic and social systems, and that the US has an advantage – but isn’t that particular definition of innovation the one mandated by those systems?
3. If the main vehicle for spreading innovation is the free market, what happens when it’s the mania for innovation that brings a key pillar of that market to its knees? How meaningful is it to talk about being a world leader in innovation in a globalised world, if that innovation is ring-fenced for commercial advantage?

The more I think about innovation, the more questions I have.

(HT: Enterprise Resilience Management Blog, via Global Dashboard.)

I started thinking innovation in the sector in the middle of last year, after reading The Shock of the Old – patchy book, but one that helps you to think more clearly about life cycles in technology. At the start of this year, the news about InSTEDD’s Humanitarian Technology Review started me thinking about innovation again. Janet quoted the following:

Lovins had heard him speak about a Sudanese refugee camp where aid trucks dispensed water from spigots three times the diameter of the spouts on people’s jugs, which not only wasted water but created puddles that attracted mosquitoes, triggering a malaria outbreak.

I found this story a little… well, strange. If your taps are too wide for people’s jerrycans, then there’s a really simple solution – a small plastic funnel. The story horrifies me not because of the wasted water, but because the solution is so simple, so cheap and so obvious – and nobody thought of it. But apparently this problem made such an impression that

[Lovins] gathered 300 experts on refugee issues, energy generation, water systems, education, design, telemedicine (and one journalist) for a 3-day brainstorming session to tackle the larger of issue of how to improve the daily lives of millions of people “caught in the middle.”

To me this sounds like Lovins got his sledgehammer and went looking for some more walnuts. I might be being unfair on Lovins and others – this is a third-hand story, after all – but one thing has become clear to me over the last few years. As exciting as many of these new technology developments are, they still don’t seem to have had much impact on the sector.

I haven’t been in the field that much in the last couple of years, but in both Bangladesh and Georgia ICT innovations was conspicuous in its absence. The technologies that have spread are the ones that have been adopted without any prompting – mobile telephony, neo-geo, and so forth (I’m actually struggling to come up with many). There is a generation of technology innovation which is seeking to piggy-back on those (particularly the ubiquitous mobile phone) but it’s too early to tell if they will be successful (remember, successful here is defined as enduring and widespread).

This goes to the heart of my thinking about innovation – because innovation is about the application of ideas. The other thing to remember is that innovation is not inherently positive – it may in fact be a dead end, a red herring or a wild goose chase.¹ Innovation can have a net negative effect if it takes resources (including attention) away from proven technologies – like plastic funnels, for example.

1. I know that I mix my metaphors, but they’re so darn tasty. [↩]

I haven’t gotten around to writing the third part of The Innovation Fallacy yet, as I’ve been finalising some information management training for UNICEF. However I did run headfirst into the following two quotes via two of my fellow bloggers.

First, Mikel, at the UNGIWG plenary, discussing open source:

The common refrain was that “the technological problems are nearly solved, it’s the social process that’s in question”.

Then, Kevin, quoting Bruce Schneier:

If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology.

Have we still not successfully communicated the above two very fundamental points to the people who make decisions? Is the problem that we’re not sufficiently skilled social engineers? Is the humanitarian community structured precisely to avoid social engineering? Questions, questions, questions.