(Illustration by Ailadi)
Contrary to popular belief, innovation isn’t new to the humanitarian sector. Organizations like the Red Cross and Red Crescent have a long history of innovating in communities around the world. Humanitarians have worked both on a global scale—for example, to innovate financing and develop the Humanitarian Code of Conduct—and on a local level—to reduce urban fire risks in informal settlements in Kenya, for instance, and improve waste management to reduce flood risks in Indonesia.
Even in its more bureaucratic image more than 50 years ago, the United Nations commissioned a report to better understand the role that innovation, science, and technology could play in advancing human rights and development. Titled the “Sussex Manifesto,” the report outlined how to reshape and reorganize the role of innovation and technology so that it was more relevant, equitable, and accessible to the humanitarian and development sectors. Although those who commissioned the manifesto ultimately deemed it too ambitious for its era, the effort nevertheless reflects the UN’s longstanding interest in understanding how far-reaching ideas can elicit fundamental and needed progress. It challenged the humanitarian system to be explicit about its values and understand how those values could lead to radical actions for the betterment of humanity.
Since then, 27 UN organizations have formed teams dedicated to supporting innovation. Today, the aspiration to innovate extends to NGOs and donor communities, and has led to myriad approaches to brainstorming, design thinking, co-creation, and other activities developed to support novelty.
However, in the face of a more globalized, connected, and complex world, we need to, more than ever, position innovation as a bold and courageous way of doing things. It’s common for people to demote innovation as a process that tinkers around the edges of organizations, but we need to think about innovation as a tool for changing the way systems work and our practices so that they better serve communities. This matters, because humanitarian needs are only going to grow, and the resources available to us likely won’t match that need. When the values that underpin our attitudes and behaviors as humanitarians drive innovation, we can better focus our efforts and create more impact with less—and we’re going to have to.
Here we explore how values-based innovation can make the work organizations are already doing more effective, and more closely linked to their vision and mission. We’ve identified three values that drive our experimentation, as well as support our shift to a more normative approach to innovation that connects us even more to our organizational missions. Importantly, these values in action can serve people—at all levels within our institutions—who want to better ground their work in the vision and mission of their organization.
Innovating by Understanding What You Really Care About
Traditionally, innovation is depicted as the creation of user-centered products or services that generate value, or that provide a competitive or strategic advantage. Organizations often use it as a tool to maximize profit, growth, or impact, but overlook or under-appreciate values as a way to motivate and interrogate innovation within their institutions. As Professor Henning Breuer writes in his book Values-Based Innovation Management, "Many organizations articulate their values in verbal or written statements. ... However, one topic is surprisingly absent from corporate communication and innovation literature alike: the intimate relations between values and innovation.”
To truly benefit from innovation, organizations need to regard it as a set of values that runs through all of their practices. Humanitarian organizations should embrace innovation as a vehicle to revisit their mission and purpose as international civil servants. This requires that we frame the humanitarian innovation agenda as a moral and values-based agenda. For example, when we develop new solutions at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the values of diversity and inclusion underpin our mandate to protect the rights of forcibly displace communities. We use inclusive design processes to tap into a huge diversity of thought, sometimes from refugee communities, sometimes from a wide range of partners—including civil society organizations such as CTEN and larger academic institutions such as the University of Essex. Working in this way helps align innovation with the mission of the organization. Additionally, we embrace values-based innovation, which essentially requires that we ask, "How do we innovate according to what we care about?"
We’ve also found it useful to define the values—including humility, curiosity, and empathy—that govern our team at UNHCR’s Innovation Service. These values closely relate to how UNHCR aspires to conduct itself, and helps direct our team’s innovation initiatives, decisions, and partnerships. Only through empathy, for example, can we understand the needs of the people we aim to serve.
The opportunity to invest in a value-based innovation framework orientates innovation beyond a market or political strategy to one that reaches new networks with a grounded and unified direction. While each individual institution or company will define its own values, we’ve seen synergies and similarities between our organizations in the humanitarian system and beyond. For example, UNICEF has developed a set of principles for the implementation of technology-enabled programs that include values such as collaboration, understanding the existing ecosystems, and design with the user—all of which align with other innovation initiatives in the humanitarian sector. This alignment helps shift how the sector works, as well as how it thinks about how it works and how it positions itself for the future.
Values-based approaches provide organizations that want to challenge traditional systems with a more accessible, inclusive framework by which to innovate. In addition, three principles below can help organizations deliberately engage with innovation in a way that not only attracts more funds or increases profits, but also helps address complex social problems.
Principle 1: Collaborate Meaningfully and Ethically
Innovation requires collaboration. But working with others to achieve something—even within our own institutions—can be frustrating, draining, and unproductive. Meaningful collaboration requires that we move beyond sharing information with others, and actively engage new people in our work and mission. The good news is science tells us that if we collaborate meaningfully to solve problems, the outcomes are better.
In the early days of mainstreaming innovation in the humanitarian sector, UNHCR’s Innovation Service aspired to adopt some of the strategies and approaches emerging in Silicon Valley, and so primarily partnered with private-sector companies based on fundraising opportunities and approaches developed and used there. Unfortunately, the same practices didn’t translate well to—or generate the same kind of impact in—the more than 130 countries where UNHCR operates. So we took a different approach that focused on knowledge sharing with our partners, as well as collective action around well-defined challenges or problems we needed to overcome.
In recent years, however, questions around how we incorporate principles of “do no harm” and ethics into building, maintaining, or adapting partnerships and innovation initiatives have become more acute and stoked discussions on how we can do better. To collaborate based on values means going beyond public relations opportunities; it means focusing on needs, ethics, collective intelligence, and action.
Nesta, a UK-based foundation focused on innovation for social good, notes that “understanding the problem, finding solutions, and making decisions about what to do … needs to be done collectively because no one person (or algorithm) knows it all.” This resonates at the UNHCR’s Innovation Service, where collective intelligence in particular helps us address challenges such as providing connectivity for refugees and the people that host them, and making the most of limited resources.
We’ve also sought out value-based partnerships with the World Meteorological Organization, the Met Office in the UK, academia, and other UN institutions to support predictive analytics work related to the European refugee situation. The partnerships have given the Innovation Service team access to data, resources, and expertise it didn’t have in-house, and laid the groundwork for a new project on predicting displacement.
With the collaborations in full swing and with the support of UN Global Pulse, an innovation initiative on big data and data science, the team ultimately launched Project Jetson, which uses technology to predict forced displacement in Somalia. Despite some missteps and failures, the technology proved successful at predicting the movement of persons based on factors such as weather and climate, conflict, market prices, and historical population movements. Without the expertise from partners who worked collectively under the umbrella of one mission and vision, this experimental solution would not have inspired new ways of understanding displacement, and therefore new ways to make decisions.
Principle 2: Recognize Power Structures to Reimagine an Inclusive Future
As humanitarians, we are concerned with the exacerbated vulnerabilities and marginalization we see in the world, but does our work perpetuate past inequalities? A values-driven approach to problem-solving and change requires that organizations actively examine the role of power in our work and ask, “What underlying bias and systemic power structures do we need to address in order for real, system-wide change to occur?” If we don’t consider these issues, we risk reinforcing power imbalances contrary to our values, excluding people who don’t have the same access to information or the same agency, and impeding our ability to think critically about the actions we take and the potential impacts on others.
About three years ago, the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) set out to understand the potential futures facing our world, and how a global humanitarian organization like ours could become fit to address them. Together with the people who would be at the forefront of the changes we thought might occur, including grassroots groups and communities, we tried to reimagine the future. The process, which we call “plural futures,” includes a wide range of methodologies and frameworks, is rigorously participatory and open, and links futures to systems and complexity thinking. Rather than rely on one dominant or homogenous perspective, it allowed us to glean a plurality of perspectives, views, visions, and ideas on issues that impact us all.
As one example, we used plural futures to develop IFRC’s Future Is Now project. Future Is Now was a range of speculative scenarios, or exhibits, that reflect how changes to global health care, financing, climate risks, and other issues might reconstruct the way our organization supports communities, delivers programs, mobilizes income streams, and uses emerging technologies. Over the course of a year, we conducted global trends research, and held numerous, iterative consultations (using face-to-face workshops, gaming, and virtual mechanisms) focused on understanding how people—including experienced social change leaders and youth volunteers—viewed their future. The different perspectives, allowed us to contextualize and understand global trends across different contexts and demographics, identify nuances, and analyze tension points.
The final, thematic, futures analysis helped shape experiential exhibits on issues like future air pollution, which displayed a sample of polluted air that simulates the atmospheric conditions of Mumbai, India, in 2036. The designers carefully calculated different growing environmental factors that affect the air conditions, particularly in large urban areas, to highlight implications for future generations. This and other exhibits served to present decision-makers with possible futures, and help them navigate strategy development and planning well into the future.
The plural futures approach also informed the Global Strategy 2030 for the entire Red Cross and Red Crescent network. The strategy process was unapologetically inclusive at all levels to ensure that it reflected the ambitions of those working on front lines of change.
Plural futures prioritizes ethical explorations of local and regional issues and solutions, partnering with a much wider range of actors than we have traditionally been used to, and applying strategic foresight to help navigate future uncertainties. It marks a true shift in understanding whether we are truly fit to serve tomorrow’s communities. Importantly, for organizations like ours that are striving to mitigate human vulnerability, in all its diversity and complexity, imposing static approaches that push a single, dominant vision of the future is counter-intuitive. We need visions for, and changes to our collective futures, in which we can all see ourselves.
Principle 3: Question Whose Voices We Value and Why
Many of the qualities and values we associate with innovation relate to diversity and inclusion. After all, imagination and creativity emerge from a multiplicity of ideas and understandings, synthesized in new and divergent ways. Despite pioneering examples of humanitarian innovation based on refugee and community-led design, for example, it is difficult to shake the Western, tech-centric, genius stereotype through which many people view and appreciate innovation. At UNHCR, we even discovered that some of the voices featured in our stories on innovation propagate a narrative we openly criticize.
Who we hear from and don’t hear from defines the status quo. Redefining whose voices we share and listen to and act on will shape our organizations’ norms and values. It’s therefore worth asking, “Who should be driving the innovation process?” and “Who does it actually empower?”—or more obviously, “Who is identifying the problems we need to solve?”
In Zimbabwe, UNHCR is co-designing operational interventions hand-in-hand with refugee communities. The communities provide feedback on potential activities, as well as create new feedback loops and community structures where UNHCR staff can act on their individual contributions. If, for example, a water or education project didn’t work, the community could let planners in UNHCR know and explain why. As a result, the UNHCR team can improve the use of resources for greater impact.
This process has changed how UNHCR views its work with refugees on the ground; we are moving away from a narrative of dependence, and toward refugees identifying their own challenges and solutions. Innovation allows us to imagine other possibilities that question the status quo and perceived norms at a time when many of our existing organizations are struggling to imagine and create something new.
Each institution, sector, company, and person has a role to play in shaping a future that is values-based and inclusive. Now is the time for institutions working for social good to examine whether they will be fit to serve communities 10, 20, or 50 years from now. We cannot solve the challenges of the future with the same systems that created them; we must continue to challenge ourselves to be explicit about our values and use them to drive innovation that will benefit all.
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Read more stories by Chris Earney & Aarathi Krishnan.