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Executive summary

The humanitarian system has a proven ability to produce innovations, but it does so sporadically and often struggles to take good ideas to scale quickly. The system does not consistently invest in innovation, and humanitarian actors have not always been successful at actively managing innovation processes. Due to this, the number of landmark innovations that have been integrated into the system has been frustratingly low and understanding of best practices for humanitarian innovation remains limited.

Giving more thought to the activities of innovation and how to support them is particularly important given the range of crises for which humanitarian assistance is needed today. Emergencies are more protracted and complex, with more barriers to access to humanitarian assistance and an increasing range of needs (ALNAP, 2015). As the nature of emergencies changes, current paradigms of humanitarian action will be challenged and humanitarians will need to adapt.

For innovation to deliver on its promise, humanitarian managers need to know how to innovate effectively and efficiently for humanitarian purposes.
Innovation is a journey humanitarians have travelled numerous times, but it is also one they can learn to travel better and with greater frequency. This report provides a roadmap for successful innovation in humanitarian contexts, based on a year-long study of 15 projects funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF). It provides the first analysis of its kind of specific project-level innovation processes in the humanitarian system.

What does successful innovation look like and how is it achieved?

A successful humanitarian innovation process is an iterative process of identifying, adjusting and diffusing ideas for improving humanitarian action that leads to:

1. Consolidated learning and evidence: New knowledge generated, or the evidence base enhanced around the area the innovation is intended to address, or around the performance of the innovation itself.

2. An improved solution for humanitarian action: The innovation offers a measurable, comparative improvement in effectiveness, quality or efficiency over current approaches to the problem addressed by the innovation and/or 3. Wide adoption of an improved solution: The innovation is taken to scale and used by others to improve humanitarian performance.

Three additional criteria for successful innovation that this research identified for further exploration and definition are inclusion of affected people, efficiency and unique impact.

Successful innovation processes tend to feature five different types of activities, or ‘stages’. Innovating teams can return to the same stage in an innovation process multiple times, and these stages, or activities, often overlap. However, in general these stages broadly track the chronology of an innovation process, and each serves a unique function by helping the innovating team answer a question that is necessary to achieve success:

1. What is the problem or opportunity for improving humanitarian action? (Recognition activities)

2. What is the potential improvement for humanitarian action? (Ideation activities)

3. How can it work? (Development activities)

4. Does it work? (Implementation activities)

5. How can wider ownership for this improvement be achieved? (Diffusion activities)

To engage in these stages effectively, innovating teams can undertake many approaches and activities. When innovation processes are successful, we found the following factors tend to be present and are understood by innovating teams and external stakeholders as contributing to success:

• Collaborating with others

• Generating and integrating evidence

• Engaging with end users and gatekeepers

• Organising an innovation process

• Resourcing an innovation

• Managing risk

• Creating a culture for innovation

This report describes how each success factor is achieved in the different stages of an innovation process and the different techniques and approaches used to accomplish this by humanitarian innovation teams