Op-Ed: Leaving the Valley
Leaving the Valley
by Max Vieille, Global Director of the Response Innovation Lab
As RIL launches its new website, I was hoping to use this opportunity to take stock of the road that we have covered since our launch. However, I am finding it quite challenging to pinpoint Response Innovation Lab’s actual date of birth. Had we founders known that this unlikely experiment in collaboration would survive exposure to reality, maybe they would have taken the time to identify a moment, THE moment, when RIL went from an idea to something more tangible. Looking back, perhaps it was in 2015 when Jennifer MacCann and her colleagues at World Vision decided to open a space for innovators to interact with humanitarians responding to the devastating earthquake in Nepal. Or perhaps, our friends in the Legal Department would point to April 29, 2019, when the fifth of our five Founding Members added their signature on our global Collaboration Agreement as the date when RIL became, ahem, real. If you were to ask me, I would tell you about a meeting I attended three years ago (January 18th-24th, 2017) in San Francisco.
“Somehow, in 2020, it feels both appropriate and wrong to list San Francisco as our birthplace. ”
Jordan 2017: Jenny Wilde, the RIL Founder visiting refugee camps to get feedback from NGOs on the joint initiatives design.
Jennifer had been traveling the globe trying to convince INGOs and other partners to join World Vision in what was then known as the Crisis Response Innovation Lab. And so a small group of innovation-focused humanitarian and humanitarian-focused innovators met at a beautiful Swissnex facility on the Embarcadero and with a clear view to the Golden Gate Bridge, to lay down the basic framework of our model, approach, processes and figure out how this could work. As we hurtled from brainstorming to ideation session, we turned into believers, and RIL became something, well, real.
For an initiative that is relentlessly, obsessively field-focused, RIL should claim inception far, far away from one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest nation in the world. Nearly every person present at the meeting was either based or had recently been working in places like Nepal, Somalia, or Haiti – even our innovation experts hailed from far outside the Bay Area. And yet, we were all drawn to Northern California, because that -- we were led to believe -- was where innovation lived.
2019: Somalia Response Innovation Lab visits a local school where the innovation Digital Attendance App is being rolled out.
Looking back
Look back at early pitch decks for RIL, references to Silicon Valley were everywhere, extolling the transformative power of innovation and the duty we all shared to spread it to and beyond the furthest reaches of the globe. We at RIL were not alone in being swept by the enthusiasm -- we were echoing the speeches heard in hundreds of INGO and UN conference rooms around the world.
“Humanitarians had to become more agile, fail fast, think different, aim for the moon - and we did. ”
We launched labs, design centers, accelerators, venture funds, hubs, and incubators; held challenges, fail fests and hackathons; hired ICT4D specialists, human-centered design experts, and many, many consultants. At the time, the vision was for the humanitarian system to use its global reach to support innovation on the frontline of humanitarian contexts, whether through developing internal solutions or through investing in emerging local or global social impact enterprises.
The assumption was that successfully piloted innovations in one place would scale quickly, much like a rideshare app can scale from San Francisco to the whole world in a few short years, transforming urban mobility as we know it. Good ideas, the thinking went, would be taken up by more and more users and receive increasingly significant investment on their journey to scale. After all, this seemed to happen all around Silicon Valley and other global start-up hubs.
2019: A Convening session takes place in Iraq Response Innovation Lab.
As We Now Know
As we now know, it is not quite that simple. The humanitarian sector has made great strides in funding hundreds of great ideas of all types through newly created in-house labs (IRC, WFP, etc…), internal accelerator funds (Save the Children, Oxfam…), global challenges (HIF, DCHI, USAID/DIV…) or venture funding (Mercy Corps, CARE, BRAC…).
As research by ELRHA, GAHI and others have shown, and as RIL’s own experience confirms, too few of these innovations end up scaling beyond initial pilot trials.
There are many reasons behind the scaling challenge, including a lack of funding and limited evidence, along with the fact that each humanitarian context is distinctly different. Finding solutions to these barriers will likely be the major focus on humanitarian innovation actors in the years to come.
Nowadays, many among us have begun to revisit the assumption that the Silicon Valley model can be applied to humanitarian contexts wholesale. Or, we are growing more aware that it was the Bay Area’s unique ecosystem that made such rapid scaling possible in the first place. Few places on earth had the combination of established, groundbreaking corporate Research and Development Centers (Xerox PARC, HP Labs), world-class academic centers (Stanford, UC Berkley), public sector customers (Sunnyvale Naval Base, NASA Moffett Field), and visionary venture capital firms (Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins). It is no accident, then, that innovators already based Northern California developed a competitive advantage and that entrepreneurs from around the world began to flock to the Bay Area. Over time, this increasingly dense, self-reinforcing concentration of well-connected technical expertise, creative talent, well-resourced customers, savvy investors, and media resources became the ultimate template for an innovation hub.
What’s not working
There are fundamental elements of the Silicon Valley model that are proving particularly unsuitable, however, to unlocking the potential of innovation in humanitarian settings. Equating innovation with disruption and high velocity erects significant barriers between these two worlds, including:
Ethical frameworks:
Humanitarian programming is bound by a broad and deep set of principles, standards, and policies, chief among them being the Do No Harm principle. In this sense, innovating in the humanitarian sphere is akin to biomedical R&D due to the number of guardrails needed whenever innovations make contact with individuals and groups and the time and costs associated with implementing the proper safeguarding mechanisms. Moving Fast and Breaking Things is deeply problematic when lives are on the line, even in a humanitarian emergency.
Risk appetite:
The above, combined with the minimal resources available to meet the massive needs of populations impacted by disaster and the high accountability requirements to which implementing organizations and donors are subject, means that failure is less accepted than in the venture capital world. While it is inevitable that new humanitarian approaches, products, and tools “fail" at various stages of their development, it is much harder for the owners of these innovations to embrace that failure and pull the plug, especially if vulnerable populations are being served. As a result, many solutions that mostly work, or kind-of work, are stuck in limbo are good enough to answer some needs but are too flawed to scale. There is also a much higher opportunity cost that humanitarian actors have to consider - every dollar invested in prototypes and pilots that may not succeed (and even if they do, may only be applied narrowly) is a dollar that could have gone to proven interventions like cash transfers, school rehabilitation, camp latrines, etc.
Evidence:
It is my impression that the basic metrics of success in the tech world focus mainly on income generated (or expected) and the number of users/customers captured. These benchmarks are very simple to count, applicable across almost any type of product or service, and easy to set targets against. In humanitarian responses, any intervention's success needs to be measured in terms of impact on affected populations. In doing so, will (and should) include a count of beneficiaries supported and demonstration of welfare changes in individuals, households, or communities for the better through the deployment of innovation. This evidence is critical for the scaling of any innovative product, service, or approach. Yet, setting the right indicators, collecting the data, and analyzing the information is a significant barrier for non-traditional humanitarian actors who lack the Monitoring & Evaluation resources and know-how to generate them.
Equity:
Humanitarian actors generally focus their interventions on the most vulnerable populations. These usually include the most deprived quintile of society, children, marginalized groups, and other people and communities on the outskirts, or excluded from the formal economy. There is often little overlap between this population and the groups that most commercial innovators target, for the simple reason that people served through humanitarian programs have minimal financial capital. There are, of course, many commercial enterprises (telecoms chief among them) that market to all elements of society. Still, aside from social enterprises often backed by specialized funding, very few start-ups can hope to recoup the costs of researching and developing innovation through selling to that segment of society. As mentioned above, there can be a perverse dynamic to concentrate even more resources into wealthier and more educated communities in a country when commercial innovation hubs are launched. Of course, this divide is rooted in the nature of the organizations themselves – commercial actors are bound to repay financial investments through profits or ownership stakes, but most humanitarian implementers offer a vastly different ROI proposition to investors. The kind of high-risk, early-stage venture capital that for-profit innovators can access does not have a counterpart in the humanitarian world.
Safety and security:
Disrupting the status quo in fragile contexts can generate threats well beyond programmatic failure. As our lab in Somalia has experienced, persons considered to be changemakers in societies where change is politicized and vested interests fiercely guarder can be at risk of intimidation, violence, or worse. Innovations that empower certain groups (women, ethnic or religious minorities, LGBTQ persons, et al.) can stir up the severe backlash, while we have seen ostensibly neutral platforms (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp) can be high jacked by factions to stir up violence and hatred. Furthermore, collecting personal data can carry very different risks from context to context – from the annoyance of unsolicited advertizing in a stable, wealthy democracy, to being targeted for retribution in a fragile or authoritarian setting.
Ownership:
Intellectual Property is the cornerstone of commercial innovation. The value of start-ups is mostly based on proprietary technology or design elements and how they may be effectively sold in the marketplace. While for-profit innovation is an increasingly important component of the humanitarian toolkit of solutions, the response space is also more predisposed to adopt innovations based on Open Source or Creative Commons models given limited funding and high need to adapt and contextualize (in addition to their closer synergy with the humanitarian principle – see the Digital Development. There is also a whole field of process innovations (think Child-Friendly Spaces, VSLAs, etc…) to which there is little commercial equivalent.
Procurement systems:
Non-traditional actors making their first foray into the humanitarian world are often dumbfounded by the byzantine procurement policies they encounter. The financial accountability mechanisms that UN agencies, NGOs, and public actors have developed to ensure transparency and good stewardship of funding run entirely contrary to the model of innovation as a fast and highly flexible process. Organizations without proven track records (i.e., start-ups) are viewed suspiciously, and ultimately new products and services run into a sourcing Catch-22 (how you get three price quotes on something only one provider currently offers?). This is not to say that non-profit procurement systems are bad – they are well suited to a reality where operating environments are fraught with risks, and donors demand elevated accountability measures. They are not, however, easily compatible with the financial systems of smaller for-profit actors or with innovation processes that require frequent pivoting.
Expectations:
There is often a fundamental difference between what is considered a need in the tech world and the humanitarian sphere. In the former, the term would include everything from relatively trivial matters (easier ways to binge watch TV shows) to more fundamental concerns (telemedicine, urban mobility, alternative energy, etc…). One fundamental assumption, however, is that the customers' basic needs (shelter, water, food, education, security, et al.) are already being met through traditional or legacy public services or market-driven systems. This allows innovation to focus on opportunities for improving or building on these basic services as opposed to having to provide them. Uber cannot work if roads are not maintained. This assumption can rarely be applied in humanitarian settings whereby nature these services are disrupted, suspended, or never existed in the first place. The needs that must be addressed through innovation are, therefore, much more fundamental and must often address (or at the very least take into account) fundamental, pervasive challenges such as poverty, illiteracy, and instability.
This is not to say that innovation cannot produce a critical change in humanitarian settings. It does and always has. Nor do I mean that everything that we associate with tech innovation and the Silicon Valley model is incompatible with humanitarian work. On the contrary, concepts such as User-Centered Design are being applied with great effect in response programming. Instead, I would like to encourage my sector colleagues to check our assumptions about what can be taken for granted, as I have had to check mine.
An alternative model for humanitarian innovation ecosystems
Though this will sound eminently self-serving for RIL (and it is), what I would like to encourage peers to collaborate with us on is the development of a different type of innovation ecosystem in humanitarian responses, one that harnesses the speed, imagination and transformational power of the fourth industrial revolution but that is also grounded in the ethical and mission-oriented approach of humanitarian actors and systems. I do not have an exact blueprint in mind, but after having seen five RIL labs develop collaborative platforms in emergencies for the past two years, I think that have an indication of what features such a model could include:
Focus on opportunities AND challenges:
In the humanitarian space, I have most often seen innovation introduced in terms of "how": How do we gain access to these hard-to-reach communities?, how can we distribute cash more securely and at a lower cost?, how can my NGO learn better from our evidence base?, etc.… On the broader innovation sphere, it would seem that many disruptive ideas came out of a "what if" proposition: What if spare bedrooms could be rented to strangers? What if we could search every website instantly? What if I arranged my next date through an app? etc. At RIL, our systems strongly lean toward the first modality – we are built to identify discrete challenges and help implementers solve these through innovation. However, we also recognize that innovators themselves are not always motivated to solve a problem that is not affecting them directly but is instead drawn to more open possibilities with limitless scaling potential. A thriving humanitarian innovation ecosystem would embrace both approaches.
Promote early adoption and adaptation:
There is an imbalance between the number of innovation developers and innovation users. Many humanitarian actors have chosen to invest limited resources into developing solutions internally, piloting, and scaling through their existing platforms. While this integrated model does make sense to address internal challenges, it runs into a couple of significant issues when it comes time to scale out: 1) many organizations are already developing their solutions to the same problem, limiting the market for uptake; and 2) compatibility with other organizational systems is unlikely to have been taken into consideration in the design of the innovation, making it harder to be adopted externally. Many INGOs may see branding value in claiming sole ownership of a particular system, but the collective costs in terms of efficiency likely outweigh individual benefits. This is why efforts such as HIF's recent WASH Evidence Challenge, which asks organizations who did not develop a piloted innovation to scale it within their programming, are essential. Future humanitarian innovation ecosystems must help make early adoption of external innovations easier and more valuable so that good ideas have more opportunities to scale.
Encourage joint ventures and social enterprises:
A remote monitoring system called FieldSight was one of the early successes of the RIL’s predecessor in Nepal. Its development brought many different organizations together, including a UN agency (UNOPS), INGO (World Vision), engineering company (Miyamoto), the Government of Nepal, and others to solve the critical problem of effective and efficient rebuilding after the devastating 2015 earthquake. It is rare that a single organization, or even a specific type of organization, holds all of the necessary elements to solve a significant challenge at the field level. INGOs and UN agencies can rarely match the technological expertise and design prowess of private companies, while the latter can rarely implement at scale under challenging contexts. Academic institutions, national and local public agencies, and, of course, civil society has just as much to offer. Humanitarian innovation ecosystems must help convene these various stakeholders to make it easier for compatible organizations to connect, identify challenges on which they can collaborate, and, perhaps most importantly, develop a level of trust between them.
We can also help build up the support system for social enterprises within these humanitarian contexts. One of the data points that has surprised me the most as RIL's information management system went live was the preponderance of these new types of hybrid organizations in our ecosystems. In Iraq, Somalia, and Uganda alone, RIL has identified 136 social enterprises with value to add to the humanitarian sector. Young, socially conscious entrepreneurs, want to create impact within their own (and other) communities, yet many of the available incubation and acceleration resources are designed for fully commercial endeavors, and most grant opportunities require NGO-based management systems.
Local before global:
This is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of RIL's approach and the one most at odds with the prevailing vision of innovation. The fantastic feat ventures such as Space X and the ubiquity of platforms such as Facebook have created an image of innovation as a highway to solving previously intractable global challenges. This view is not without merit – there is little sense to debate the profound contributions that cellular phone technology and genetically engineered crops have had on the developing world. And a "moonshot" method may well end up solving more of the world's greatest development challenges. However, this top-down approach will maintain and even consolidate innovation leadership within established hubs, as far as possible, geographically and conceptually from the people who are experiencing these challenges. In humanitarian situations, where needs are most acute and solutions most urgent, it is deeply problematic to concentrate not only on the development of solutions but also the decision-making on what ideas should be rewarded in faraway global capitals and hubs.
This brings us back, then, to the Bay Area and that week in 2017. You probably hope that this also brings us to the end of this interminable post, and it does.
I hope that you will join RIL, in whatever unique way you want and can explore what new models of humanitarian innovation ecosystems we can help construct. Whether you work globally or in one of the places where we operate labs (Jordan, Uganda, Somalia, Puerto Rico, and Iraq), I hope you will reach out to us. We may not be able to offer you a view of the Golden Gate, but we can catch a glimpse of another future that we can build together.