Strengthening the Humanitarian Innovation Ecosystem Humanitarian Innovation

3 THIS REPORT COMES AT a time when the international humanitarian community is facing unprecedented challenges that are growing in scale, scope and complexity. There is growing awareness of the need for transformational change in what humanitarian actors do and how they do it, to maintain relevance, reputation and impact. This report focuses on new and growing efforts to achieve such change through humanitarian innovation. Wherever it happens, innovation is about creating value through the application of new ideas. But it seldom occurs purely by chance. The overarching aim of this report is to analyse and assess the ecosystem of actors and factors shaping innovation within the humanitarian sector. 1 The objective is to understand and recommend how best to strengthen and improve the humanitarian innovation ecosystem so it can make the best possible contribution to overall humanitarian effectiveness. Innovation ecosystems vary considerably between sectors, industries and countries. But the most effective examples have a number of common features. These include: a clear sense of overall strategic vision around which to focus innovation search and selection behaviour; system; a high level of openness on the knowledge supply side, with networks feeding in and recombining ideas from different sources; a well-articulated sense of end-user needs, achieved through high levels of consultation, involvement and co-creation; and that enables both incremental and radical innovation processes, covering both systematic improvement of existing methods and approaches and more creative and entrepreneurial exploration of novel solutions and mechanisms to ensure the mainstream can assess and quickly assimilate new ideas. humanitarian innovation ecosystem contains a number of these necessary features, to varying degrees, in pockets here and there. But, in a number of critical ways, it falls some the following issues: 1) Resource, information and capacity gaps, urgently need to be addressed. Resources need to be expanded and made more predictable, to provide end-to-end pathways for innovation; to become more diverse in innovation efforts. 2) innovations, to support innovation processes 3) There is a need for concerted investment in innovation management skills and capacities. The sector needs to attract people with new skill sets and provide appropriate training for existing staff so as to enable those closest to available knowledge to enhance operations. 4 4) The innovation ecosystem is weakly integrated and needs active facilitation, networking and brokering of relationships between existing and new actors. A key priority is to strengthen and facilitate interactions and relationships across …