Changing the world, one innovation at a time
Mobilising the power of social innovation
Necessity may the mother of invention — but in today’s world she’s a pretty fraught mum, trying to deal with thousands of kids tugging at her skirts, pulling at her arms and wrapping themselves around her legs. All screaming out for attention. We’re not short of challenges which affect the very basics of trying to live our lives — getting enough to eat, clean water to drink, a roof over our heads and some peace to allow us to sleep at night. It might look neat and tidy to package these up into something like the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals but we shouldn’t forget that beneath those critical targets for change lie thousands of things that need improving.
And we keep coming up with new ways of going down. Nature can be pretty hostile, with its round of earthquakes, floods, devastating storms and droughts but we have become adept at adding to the misery with our own man-made disasters.
In the face of all this we need to “….be bold, be revolutionary… and disrupt… because without innovation, there is no way we can overcome the challenges of our times.” Wise words and an urgent call to action from Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations. And of course he’s not alone; the case for social innovation on a global scale is clearly made every time you open a newspaper or scan a news website. The question is not one of whether or not we need innovation but how to deliver it?
Fortunately we’re making some progress along that road, learning to innovate and to do so more effectively. Thankfully there have always been people who have tried to respond to the challenges posed by natural or man-made humanitarian disasters and unequal development. Innovation has always happened and social entrepreneurs are not a new thing. Think Albert Schweizer, Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, Washington Carver, George Cadbury and countless others who have worked to create change for good.
But what has changed is a growing recognition of the need not just to respond but to learn lessons about how to do so effectively. How to master the capabilities around being able to repeat the innovation trick? Anyone might get lucky once but how can we keep on doing so? Just like a commercial company able to churn out a steady stream of new products we need the ability to keep innovating and to learn to manage the process more effectively.
The challenge of innovating is what it always was — how to create value from ideas. It’s not a lightbulb moment; there’s no instantaneous flash and suddenly the new-born innovation is there ready to change the world. Instead it’s a journey through some pretty uncertain territory towards realising the value in our idea. Anyone might get lucky once but if we’re serious about using innovation to create social value then we need to learn to make that journey and to do so regularly.
Studies of innovation management point to the idea of ‘routines’ — patterns of behaviour which are learned and repeated , becoming embedded in processes and structures, ‘the way we do things around here’ in our organizations. How we search for opportunities, how we select and prioritise projects so we don’t waste our scarce resources. How we grow our idea through careful prototyping, agile innovation, learning as we go and pivoting towards something which will work.
And the good news is that we now know a lot about routines for successful innovation. We’ve been studying this, learning from research and (mostly) from hard-won experience about what works and what doesn’t for well over a hundred years. We can write books about it, teach courses on it, build a huge management consulting industry around it. There’s a body of knowledge which is growing and it contains key information about what we might call the DNA of successful innovation.
We’ve reached a point where the International Standards Organization has mapped the process, given us a guide framework for how innovation ought to be managed. Not as a single activity but as an integrated system, enabled by key routines which evolve and are adapted for a particular organization. It’s absolutely not a case of one size fits all but there are guidelines — ‘genes’ which code for success in different parts of the system and which ensure a healthy innovation process.
These are lessons which smart organizations have always known — but only because they’ve been paying attention, reflecting on how they innovate and adapting and extending their routines into policies, processes and structures. Successful players, members of what might be called the ‘100 club’ (organizations which have life spans in excess of a hundred years) don’t get there by accident. Facing a world of uncertainty and sometimes violent change they’ve learned to innovate as a way of surviving and growing. Companies like 3M, Corning, P&G and Rolls-Royce have clear maps of their own around how to organize and manage innovation — and they are not afraid to revise, sometimes dramatically, as they confront new environments.
The good news is that this kind of systematic approach is increasingly being used in the service of social innovation. For example we’ve learned a lot about how to help start-ups grow their bright ideas through careful support and incubation — there are innumerable bootcamps and other structures which can and do help. We can use hackathons to focus ideas and energy on finding novel ways of dealing with key challenges. And we can train key entrepreneurial skills around building and populating business models to give shape and structure, creating an architecture through which ideas can create value.
These models have diffused widely in the social innovation space. For example many agencies of the United Nations have long-running programmes which draw potential innovators together and help them with advice, funding and mentoring. Take the World Food Programme, which works to try and ensure that ‘in a world of plenty hunger should be a thing of the past’. It is helping deliver on this mission, employing 23,000 people in 120 countries and it puts innovation at the heart of its approach. Ensuring millions of people, often in vulnerable and conflict-torn situations are fed is not an easy task and requires mobilising ingenuity at every turn. WFP have a long-running commitment to innovation formalised in its Innovation Accelerator which has been operating since 2015 and which uses multiple mechanism to find and support innovators throughout the journey from idea to effective impact. In 2022 alone over 37 million people benefitted from innovations coming through this route.
Examples include hunger mapping tools to pinpoint where aid is needed, blockchain solutions to enable secure transactions and deliver aid which increasingly takes the form of cash transfers rather than simple food delivery, helping people help themselves. Drone delivery to remote and inaccessible locations, hydroponic solutions which allow otherwise inhospitable environments to support growing food and deploying chatbots to enable communication between vulnerable people in crisis zones and those able to help meet their needs. The Share the meal app offers a simple way of allowing consumers throughout the world to make a small donation to help alleviate hunger. It’s essentially a focused crowdfunding approach; by 2023 it had shared over 200 million meals from 1.4 million app users, raising an estimated $30m.
Importantly the WFP Accelerator provides a range of support to innovators from early stage idea development right through to working to help successful pilot programmes move to significant scale. And it operates at the frontier of knowledge about effective ways to enable innovation in organizations; for example, it was recognised by Fast Company magazine in 2021 as one of the world’s most innovative players in the not-for-profit sector.
UNICEF, the UN’s agency dedicated to building a better world for children has followed a similar path. It claims a 70 year history of innovatng for children and its Office for Innovation was established to offer a variety of routes and mechanisms to attract and support innovators, helping grow their ideas and increasingly move them to wide scale adoption where they can have significant impact. Their portfolio is equally wide, ranging from high technology like drones, AI and a huge range of digital solutions but also working with ‘frugal innovation’ solutions, geared to local contexts.
The idea of innovation labs — give them whatever name you like but think about an environment which allows incubation and growth of new ideas — is widespread. Nowhere more so than in the United Nations Development Programme which launched an ambitious network of 91 labs supporting innovators in 115 locations around the world. Running since 2019 it is an attempt not just to provide local support in different countries but to create a learning network where good ideas and practices can be shared and diffused around the world. It has enabled a wide range of people, many of them ‘grassroots innovators’ to articulate and develop their ideas into viable and valuable solutions.
It’s not just spaces and facilities to encourage innovation; increasingly the role of ‘innovation manager’ is being taken up to provide key skills and enable the process. Organizations like the Humanitarian Innovation Fund have employed people in this role to help deliver their innovation strategy, overseeing funding and selection, development of new programmes and delivery of established support such as their Journey to Scale programme, now in its third iteration. Examples of projects which they funded and which have now gone on to scale include work with Translators without Borders aimed at offering local language translation services during humanitarian response, open street mapping to crowdsource the creation of maps in disaster zones and work with the Red Cross to provide menstrual hygiene management (MHM) kits that are culturally appropriate and effective relief items for emergencies
Organizations are becoming increasingly strategic in their innovation targeting, moving beyond provision of badly-needed products and services as an offering. They are also focusing on internal processes and development of external delivery ecosystems and they are targeting particular ‘markets’ — identified groups of vulnerable end-users of innovations. For example there has been growing emphasis on innovations which target the challenge of gender-based violence and on the educational needs of displaced persons.
Support also exists in the form of learning resources; a growing number of tools and courses are available to equip innovators with relevant skills and do so in ways which deliver them online to improve accessibility. Examples include the Humanitarian Innovation Guide, the Business Model Sustainability Toolkit, the United Nations Innovation Toolkit and the Mission Model Canvas.
One of the well-established skill sets across aid agencies is their monitoring and evaluation processes. Designed to allow transparency and accountability to various stakeholders these represent powerful tools for capturing and sharing learning — and these approaches have been adapted to the innovation space. So, for example, the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (via ALNAP) used its M&E skills to review and reflect on success factors in delivering multiple innovation projects. The result was a report — ‘More than just luck’ — which provided a valuable platform for building and strengthening a systematic approach for the future.
This also highlights the value of communities of practice, groups of individuals and organizations which converge around shared interests. And the power of such communities in accelerating innovation through experience sharing can be seen in the Cash Learning Partnership (CALP) which was originally set up in 2005 to try and develop ways of delivering aid via cash transfers using mobile phones, credit cards, etc. It has enabled a revolution in the delivery systems for aid agencies, getting important resources to people rapidly in the wake of many different kinds of emergency.
Innovation involves a moving frontier; the context in which we are trying to create value is constantly changing. And there’s a need for innovating organizations to build evolving systems — taking on new challenges as the routines for the basics of innovation become established. A key thrust along this frontier is the challenge of scale — the humanitarian and development system has a healthy pipeline of new ideas and the channels to build those into pilot solutions which prove the concept in a particular context. What’s missing is the next step, scaling those innovations to have real impact. This has spawned extensive research and sharing of insights summarised, for example, in a recent report by UN Global Pulse. And once again the role of communities of practice becomes important; IDIA (the International Development Innovation Alliance) brings together multiple players with a common interest around this challenge, one which is also being addressed by the Scaling Group within the United Nations Innovation Network.
Maturity in innovation management is measured in part by the ability to reflect critically and explore challenges inside the organization in terms of its structures and approaches. Nowhere is this more evident than around the challenge of ‘ambidexterity’ — where the part of the organization concerned with operations and delivery comes into conflict with the part concerned with exploring and pushing the frontiers. Innovation is central to both but where the former requires incremental ‘do what we do but better’ approaches (sometimes called ‘exploit’ innovation), the latter requires doing something different — ‘explore’ innovation.
Both are needed but the structures and cultures to enable them are very different. All large and established organizations encounter this challenge and many approaches have evolved around corporate entrepreneurship and other ways of rekindling the innovation spark from within. It’s instructive to see bodies like the United Nations now openly identifying and working with this set of challenges.
We’ve got a long way to go and the waves of crisis keep washing up against our beach. But we’re learning to build more than sandcastles; we’ve begun to put in place structures and systems and have growing resources in terms of skills and capabilities to help stem the tide.
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