Distribution by Region

Distribution by Organisation Type, Document Type, Region and Year

Innovation occurs mostly in documents published in Europe, followed by North America, Asia, Africa and Oceania with comparatively smaller contributions. Overall, the top five contributors in terms of occurrences are IGO, NGO, NGO_Fed, Net and State organisations.

IGO documents provide the greatest number of occurrences, primarily from general documents published in Europe. Occurrences from NGO, NGO_Fed, Net and State were mostly obtained from activity reports published in Europe.

Innovation ...

• is a/an

  • area

• • process

• objective

• result

• often risky investment

• can be categorised by

  • age

• • value

• • scale

• • origin

• • field/sector

• • area of focus

• • humanitarian objective

• has three main types

  • technological innovation, which

    • has an enormous impact on humanitarian work

    • drives change

    • can prevent disaster

    • requires adaptation

    • can merit scepticism

  • humanitarian innovation, which

    • helps improve outcomes

    • allows cutting edge work

    • has an ethical dimension

    • can be pragmatic

    • can focus on immediate needs

    • requires evaluation

    • requires participation

  • social innovation, which

    • is contrasted with technological innovation

    • focuses on behaviours, relationships & perspectives

• is pursued by

  • humanitarian organisations

  • private industry

  • governments

  • affected populations

• results in three types of humanitarian contributions

  • establishing methodologies

  • providing resources

  • inventing technologies

• requires

  • cooperation & partnership

  • platforms, labs & other infrastructure

  • special funding

  • failure and the willingness to fail

  • creative staff & culture

  • self-assessment

  • sharing knowledge

  • participation from affected populations

  • new technologies

  • problem recognition

• has attitudinal barriers

• has infrastructural barriers

• has communication barriers

• has financial barriers

• • has deployment barriers

• has consequences, which can

  • worsen conditions

  • create new challenges

  • require adaptation

  • require new expertise

Innovation is “an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by the individual or other unit of adaption” (Rogers, 2003). From this definition, innovation is relative. The Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF), which supports the identification and sharing of solutions to the challenges facing effective humanitarian assistance, took this definition one step further by including the purpose and outcomes of the innovation, which in turn imply that innovation is a process: “Innovations are dynamic processes which focus on the creation and implementation of new or improved products and services, processes, positions and paradigms. Successful innovations are those that result in improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, quality or social outcomes/impacts” (HIF, 2013a).

To us, innovation means scaling up new solutions from other organisations and developing new solutions ourselves and with partners.

For us, innovation means doing things differently, so they have a greater impact, are more effective, cheaper and more sustainable.

Innovation for us means addressing a social problem with a novel solution that is more effective, more efficient, more sustainable, or simply more fair and then using testing and research to back up our theories.

Towards a culture of innovation in humanitarian agencies The concept of innovation itself, as an organisational aspiration and area of activity, has taken root in the humanitarian system.

Openness and flexibility, just like cross-fertilization and innovation, are part of our DNA.

We are committed to learning and innovation, because it is part of who we are and how we have progressed over the past 20 years.

• area

  • area of activity, development

  • theme

  • issue

  • venue for exchanging knowledge

• process

  • complex process

  • way of thinking

  • cycle

• objective

  • goal

  • organisational aspiration, value

  • factor for success

  • criterion

• result

  • new idea, practice or object

  • product of unconventional viewpoints

• age

  • new innovation

  • recent innovation

• value

  • successful, effective innovation

  • important, major, key innovation

  • promising innovation

• scale

  • small, large innovation

  • local innovation

  • regional innovation

  • systemic innovation

• origin

  • Swedish innovation

  • military innovation

  • U.S. global development lab innovation

• field/sector

  • technological, technical, technology innovation

  • digital innovation

  • scientific innovation

  • social innovation

  • agricultural innovation

  • medical, health innovation

  • business innovation

  • humanitarian innovation

  • financial innovation

• area of focus

  • process innovation

  • operational innovation

  • internal innovation

  • strategic innovation

  • practical innovation

  • institutional innovation

  • product innovation

  • program innovation

  • green innovation

  • policy innovation

• humanitarian objective

  • innovation in humanitarian action

  • innovation in humanitarian response

  • innovation for poverty action

  • innovation in disaster risk reduction, assessment, management

  • innovation in measuring inequality

  • development innovation

  • social policy innovation

Leaps in technological innovation have been fundamental in the 21st century and education technology innovation continues to evolve. However, innovation in education technology exacerbates the division between the world's learners.

We also hope to spur technological innovation in the water and sanitation fields and to help launch initiatives to encourage changes in hygiene and sanitation practices that would lead to greatly improved health as well as economic and social benefits.

Technological Innovations Appropriate and timely usage of technology can not only help avert disasters but also help to cover the disastrous effects of a calamity.

Recently, there has been growing interest in technological innovation that leaps the paths that developed countries have trodden and the backflow of new technologies that have been demonstrated and commercialized in developing countries to developed countries (reverse innovation).

For example, we're planning to move our core systems to the cloud to make sure we benefit from the security, flexibility and cost savings such services offer, as well as helping us to keep up with the pace of technological innovations .

Although these technologies have been around for three decades and are widely used among humanitarians, several new trends in technological innovations are cause for great excitement, but are also the source of scepticism within the humanitarian community.

The term humanitarian innovation refers to new products, forms of cooperation or other solutions that are measurably better than those that are in use today. Such solutions may lead to improvements in effectiveness or in quality. They may be more sustainable and environmentally friendly or have other positive ripple effects. Innovation and innovative solutions may also reduce costs, and thus help to reduce the humanitarian funding gap.

Defining successful humanitarian innovation : three core criteria We can identify the criteria for successful innovation by reflecting on the value that an innovation process offers across a range of scenarios: The 'ideal' scenario, in which innovation is fully successful and has causally contributed to improvements in humanitarian action. The 'missing middle' scenario, in which an innovation has developed an effective idea for improving humanitarian action but may not have been adopted by many humanitarian organisations. The 'good fail' scenario, in which the original idea turned out to be ineffective or unfeasible, but lessons are generated that can support future successful innovations.

Innovation in humanitarian action has become an important issue for the sector, with new technologies and dynamic ideas changing the way it provides critical assistance to disaster and conflict.

Professor Betts underlined that new areas of humanitarian work require ethical guidance. For example, principles for humanitarian innovation have been part of the World Humanitarian Summit consultations, and this has raised a number of ethical dilemmas. To be ethical, humanitarian innovation has to be for a humanitarian purpose and strengthen the primary relationship in humanitarian response between provider and beneficiaries, without any intermediary.

But in the aftermath of crisis, natural disaster or conflict, finding ways to provide even the most fundamental elements of humanitarian aid often requires extraordinary effort. As a result, humanitarian innovations in the region tend to overcome problems using what is available, mixing low and high technology, importing from other sectors and designing for cost-effectiveness and robustness. This type of "frugal innovation" is increasingly recognized in business and development in West and Central Africa.

There was also agreement on the need to evaluate humanitarian innovations, noting that the need to experiment and take risks was not always conducive with immediate evaluation, but that it was a necessity to prevent unintended harmful consequences and to ensure that new approaches contributed to improved humanitarian outcomes.

These staff guide and carry out humanitarian resilience and response activities, and we need to engage with them to ensure that they can actively participate in the humanitarian innovation agenda.

Much of humanitarian innovation has focused to date on ‘product’ innovation, solutions that solve specific, well-defined problems. The big, high impact challenges are often far more complex, ranging from the multiple factors driving Gender-based Violence to the combinations of elements needed to take innovation to scale.

Hivos will change its core process towards promoting social innovation , which entails generating new ideas, approaches and initiatives that will contribute to solving persistent and complex social, cultural, economic and environmental issues.

Innovation has always defined human history, whether by great inventions or social innovations developed over centuries.

ACFID sees social innovation as critical to today's international development and humanitarian response, where its impact and effectiveness is gauged by its contribution to achieving social outcomes.

For Oxfam to achieve change at scale, we need intentional social innovation. This includes: supporting country programs to effectively develop cutting edge programs; exploring alternative models of delivery; focusing on innovation: and building a culture of considered risk-taking to accelerate solutions to the world's most pressing social issues.

Through the technological innovation cooperation programs (PROCIs), IICA continued to bolster mutual cooperation among countries of the five regions.

A humanitarian innovation contest was held by the World Humanitarian Summit secretariat ahead of the regional consultation. The innovation contest was for humanitarian projects and initiatives, ongoing or under development, in the Eastern and Southern Africa region that used an innovative approach to improve the efficiency of humanitarian response.

Innovation Platform (IP) The IPs are a space for learning and change for individuals and organizations. Five IPs have been established to bring together farmers, traders, food processors, researchers, government officials, etc, to diagnose problems, identify opportunities and explore ways to achieve their goals.

The protection innovation lab is expected to be established in 2018 and will assist in identifying and scaling-up innovative processes to protection challenges.

A dedicated Innovation Fund is financing promising early-stage projects like these, and UNICEF's Global Innovation Centre is expanding the most effective initiatives.

The funding is being invested in programmes across all our change themes and in an Innovation Fund that will enable us to support programmes that are more creative, with potential for high impact but carrying higher risk.

Innovation A key asset of SPARK is its flexibility and creative staff and therefore its ability to innovate.

For Medair, innovation also means nurturing a culture of holistic continuous improvement by empowering our staff to creatively solve problems.

Realistic self-assessment lies at the heart of learning and innovation , both for us as an organisation as well as for conflict stakeholders and actors.

For innovation to occur there must be an open exchange of different ideas and concepts.

Our approach to innovation involves forging partnerships across the private sector and civil society too, as they can bring ideas welltested in other situations.

Innovation involves cooperation, the private sector, and listening to affected people.

By contrast, in the humanitarian sector, funding originates primarily from government donors, with a different set of incentives and low tolerance for risk – a serious handicap, given that, in the words of one private sector interviewee, 'innovation requires failure'.

The most successful innovations usually begin when a problem or challenge is recognized, defined and articulated.

Technological advances have not only transformed work; they are also engines for new forms of creativity and innovation .

We want innovation to multiply our impact and we will invest in innovation and research.

• criteria

  • impact potential, collaboration

  • transparency, accountancy, governance, impact

• themes

  • quality, transparency, growth, fundraising

• areas

  • capacity building, technological development

• goals

  • scale, impact

• organisational values

  • openness, flexibility, cross-fertilization

  • learning

• issues

  • climate change, sustainable development goals

• ways of thinking

  • creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, decision-making, learning

The chart below represents the distribution of innovation between 2005 and 2019 in terms of the number of occurrences and relative frequency of occurrences. It also allows you to view the distribution across Regions, Organisations and Document types.

Barriers to Innovation

Sample Contexts

Humanitarian innovation is part of a larger conversation about change and improvement; however current incentives are poorly aligned to support innovation in the humanitarian system. Barriers continue to exist due to rigid funding requirements by donors, greater aversion to risk, the ways in which political economy and interests inhibit scaling of proven ideas (like cash programming), and the absence of a consolidated evidence and knowledge base.

The challenges of achieving change

Despite this rapid proliferation of innovation initiatives and funding, innovation has yet to be fully integrated within humanitarian operations. Emerging ideas get stuck at the pilot stage or siloed within a single organisation, unable to achieve scale and impact. In order to change this, it is important to understand where this policy agenda has come from, and to see innovation as part of a wider conversation about strategic change and improvement in the humanitarian system.

First, humanitarian innovation as a broad approach is new to many we have engaged with to date, and feedback suggests that the terminology used in innovation discourse is often inaccessible to national and local NGOs, preventing them from actively adopting these concepts.

Innovators know how their own new techniques have performed, but they lack effective means to inform investors and potential adopters. Investors and adopters may have no reliable way to compare innovations or to learn whether a particular innovation would work under different conditions. This information gap is particularly wide in agriculture, where best practices are location-specific and sustainable productivity growth requires diverse innovations to suit particular environments.

Consequences of Innovation

However, it is also important to bear in mind that some innovations may throw up new challenges, for example related to protection, corruption or a lack of digital expertise. One weakness of innovation in the humanitarian sector is that the affected population is rarely involved. Humanitarian innovation is also slowed by short-term financing, limited risk appetite, and weak links between the humanitarian sector and the private sector. This makes it important to promote cooperation on innovation, both between humanitarian organisations and between the humanitarian sector and the private sector.

In tandem with the growth of the humanitarian enterprise in the aftermath of the cold war, predictions about a humanitarian crisis of legitimacy and concerns about the integrity of the key humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, universality and humanity have been cropping up at regular intervals. The embrace of technological innovation presents humanitarians with a new set of challenges to the sanctity of these principles.

Real-time information tracking can be abused. For example, if it becomes possible to follow troop movement or migration patterns in real-time, there is a likelihood that this data could be used irresponsibly. Ethics in humanitarian innovation is a serious issue (Blunt, 2015).

It will argue that most true innovation is coming not from aid agencies but from affected populations, who are using communications technology to meet everyday needs, join global networks, transfer money and transform their daily lives.

A significant way in which innovations can reach better results is by giving more dignity and choice to crisis-affected populations.

Box 1 Key lessons

[....]

Lesson 2: There were considerable contextual and political barriers to innovation.

Lesson 3: Most of the creativity and novelty present in the response involved tactical adaptations to the context.

Lesson 4: Many ‘visible’ and high-profile innovations had no or little connection to the operational setting.

Lesson 5: Transformative innovations need foresight and preparedness if they are to be brought into responses in an effective and timely manner.

Lesson 6: Resourcing for innovation, although potentially available, was not focused and targeted enough on priority challenges.

Lesson 7: Almost all of the innovation that took place in the response was within specific organisations, rather than across organisations.

Lesson 8: International organisations paid insufficient attention to the role of local organisations and end-users in innovation.

Lesson 9: Innovation needs to be thought about and undertaken in a much more open and democratic fashion than is currently the case.

Lesson 10: Operational humanitarian innovation is still very much a nascent effort.

Innovation processes can often appear weak on efficiency, particularly when they involve the development of new technologies or tools. There are, however, clear best practices that organisations can use to improve the timeliness and thus efficiency of their innovation process. For example, having a clear division of tasks and responsibilities across the innovating team and partners was supportive of an efficient innovation process. Also important are wellplanned pilots that include defined times for collecting and responding to feedback, and that are implemented in a way that is complementary to the standard operating procedures, organisational structures or practices of pilot participants.

Researchers also found that the impacts of innovation are closely associated with the size and density of the social networks in which the smallholders operate, suggesting that the livelihood impacts of innovations are often distributed unequally across regions. This study has contributed to the discourse on how innovation systems perspectives can change conventional views of science that study technology adoption as a linear process (research extension adoption), to one that studies how technological change is embedded within larger, more complex systems of diverse actors, their actions and interactions, and the social and economic institutions that condition their cultures, behaviors, and practices