Category Archives: Innovation

The Innovation Fallacy, Part 3

Posted on November 30, 2008 by | 15 Comments

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.

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Stating the obvious about technology

Posted on November 27, 2008 by | Leave a comment

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.

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The Innovation Fallacy, Part 2

Posted on November 25, 2008 by | 8 Comments

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.

  1. And you’ll be glad to know that Malcolm Gladwell agrees with me, for what that’s worth. [↩]
  2. As our panicked response to rising food costs has shown… [↩]

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Posted in Innovation

The Innovation Fallacy, Part 1

Posted on November 22, 2008 by | 6 Comments

I spoke last week with Conor Foley, who’s looking at innovation in the humanitarian sector for the next ALNAP annual report. As any fule kno, innovation is a particularly interest of mine, particularly technology innovation, but I wasn’t surprised to hear that most of his interviewees shared my perspective: that the humanitarian community is not much good at innovation.

I should qualify that. The humanitarian community is built on innovation – on 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. I should probably qualify that as well:

  1. All innovations have a distinct lifespan, and are often superceded by a new innovation (or more rarely a completely new invention). So if an innovation endures over time, that is evidence of its success; but if an innovation doesn’t endure, that isn’t necessarily evidence of its failure.
  2. All innovations are context-specific, and sometimes don’t translate into other contexts. So likewise, if an innovation spreads geographically / organisationally, that is evidence for its success; but if it doesn’t, that isn’t necessarily evidence of its failure.

These two qualifications makes successful innovation sometimes hard to identify – but not impossible. In terms of projects that I’ve been involved with inside the sector, I think the Humanitarian Information Centres, the ECB Project and NetHope all qualify without any doubt (although the innovation in each project is exhibited in very different ways). What interests me more is innovation outside the sector.

I’ve been involved with Sahana for a long time now, and I wouldn’t hesitate to identify it as the single biggest innovation I’ve seen – potentially revolutionary. You can also point to projects like Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS and so forth – projects that, while not “humanitarian” in themselves, have definite humanitarian applications – but the strange thing about all these is that they haven’t managed to get significant traction inside the “traditional” humanitarian sector.

The question is, Why is this the case? What makes the humanitarian community unable to recognise and replicate innovation? And that, my friends, will be the subject of the next post…

UPDATE: To my eternal guilt and shame, I forgot to mention a fourth project that I was involved with, Aid Workers Network – again, work that was well ahead of its time, mainly thanks to Mark Hammersley.

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