Innovation is nothing new. Since the beginning of humanity, we humans have innovated. And by that I mean we’ve continually adapted ourselves and have found new ways to cope with complex challenges and crises, all the while improving our daily lives. The word...
Roy Amara coined the phrase “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”[1] Sweeping changes, transformations that fundamentally alter the way the world works, are easily discounted...
Humanitarian Innovation Jam, January 15-16, Washington DC How can we create healthy ecosystems for managing humanitarian innovation? We’re once again looking for humanitarian pracitioners, students, scholars, and private sector partners to converse and...
Managing innovation is terrifying. It’s terrifying for many different reasons, but here I’ll just outline four: 1) Expectations are huge; 2) Resistance to change is not insignificant; 3) The need for innovation in our sector is not small; 4) You have to manage...
In his book, The World After Midnight, Eddie Obeng talks about how ‘today, the current pace, scale and interconnectedness of change exceed our ability to learn.’ This means that failure – caused by uncertainty and complexity, as opposed to incompetence – is becoming...
