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:
- All innovations have a distinct lifespan, and are often superceded by a new innovation (or more rarely a completely new invention).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.
- 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.