What is innovation?
- Innovation is the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service so that it creates value.
- Innovation is an iterative process that identifies, adjusts and diffuses ideas. The innovation process utilizes a set of tools and methodologies through which to solve challenges. It’s non-linear, it’s experimental, and it is robust.
- Innovation is not simply technology, it is not only for the younger generations, and it is not something only a few people can do.
Why is innovation important to UNHCR?
Innovation is about creating value for refugees, introducing novel solutions, and often simply doing things better. It embodies a new way of working, and enables new approaches such as the CRRF to happen faster, and more adaptable. Innovation is important to UNHCR because it makes us more agile, more open to collaboration, and makes us more effective for the people we serve.
Innovation already plays a key role in achieving the strategic directions of the High Commissioner. This not only needs to continue, but innovation as an approach needs to become increasingly central to our way of working – the old is increasingly irrelevant and ineffective – that includes how we solve problems and address challenges. UNHCR’s ability to absorb new ways of working, including the skills and tools that encompass innovation, are critical to the future of refugee protection, and therefore the future of UNHCR.
Who owns innovation at UNHCR?
Innovation is not owned by a single team or division but touches all aspects of UNHCR’s work from human resources to protection. Innovation is about creating value for refugees and simply doing things better. In reality, UNHCR has always been innovating given the complexity in which the organisation works and its mission to improve the lives of refugees.
Who innovates in UNHCR?
Anyone in the organization can innovate if they wish, regardless of age, nationality, position or gender. Innovators have a creative mindset and desire to solve complex challenges facing our organization – given the right tools, each person in the organization has the power for creating change.
What is the role of UNHCR’s Innovation Service?
UNHCR’s Innovation Service creates an enabling environment for innovation to flourish in UNHCR by facilitating spaces to innovate, capturing bright spots of innovation, and ensuring staff and refugees can increasingly draw on innovation to solve the most pressing of challenges. We seek to drive humanitarian innovation through a wide set of partners, making innovation accessible to staff and refugees, and most importantly, we seek to prepare UNHCR for the future of forced displacement. The Innovation Service seeks to create a deliberate path for innovation to be facilitated, focused on not only creating new approaches to assist in the protection of refugees, but a creating a culture and mindset shift across the organization.
Why we need to create space to innovate in UNHCR?
In order to create sustainable innovation in UNHCR, we do need to focus on mindset and culture. This requires that managers at all levels of the organisation encourage, and create the space for staff to innovate and experiment in their day-to-day work. Organisational culture is not something to be dealt with when everything else is done, but it is the foundation of everything we are working towards. It is about how an organisation’s people interact, work, and approach new solutions. The mindset UNHCR is trying to foster is challenging assumptions, changing perspective, the value of collaboration and openness for failure and risk taking. It’s one that leads staff to question if there is a better way of working, of communicating, and of thinking.
What is the role of partnerships when we talk about innovation?
Partnerships are needed for innovation to happen. Partnerships allow learning, and exchange of knowledge and expertise, intelligence from a particular industry, to influence said industry, and/or to co-create solutions. Sometimes this results in fundraising opportunities for other parts of the organisation.
In reality, innovation is about many things, but most importantly, it’s about collaboration. Not only do we need to engage refugees when we are innovating, but we want to innovate with whole of society. This approach cannot occur in silos and it cannot happen without diversity, and that includes diversity of stakeholders, which is a critical element that undergirds the CRRFs multi-stakeholder approach. When we think about innovation and partnership, this requires us to go outside the scope of the private sector and to tap into the expertise of other UN agencies, academia, local partners, and most importantly, refugees themselves.
What is the role of technology when we talk about innovation?
If innovation is confined to how we use new technology, we are missing a massive opportunity for our organisation, and for those we serve – including opportunities to innovate systems, and processes. While innovation can be technology, in many instances, it is not. For example, biometric registration is a great model for the application of technology that lead to innovation in UNHCR’s processes and created a paradigm shift in service orientation. Alternatively, we could look at UNHCR’s Boda Boda Talk Talk initiativewhich introduced audio equipment on the back of motorbikes to better communicate information to refugees in Uganda. Through experimentation and the iteration of an idea, that was created hand-in-hand with the refugee community, UNHCR found value in the Boda Boda Talk Talk project. We can recognize the value that technology has to play, and the opportunities it has to offer, but we must also understand its contextual limitations and not get lost in modernization efforts.
Learn more
If you want to know more about humanitarian innovation, here are some great places to start:
Our favorite reads on what innovation means to UNHCR and the humanitarian sector:
- Why innovation is about diversity and inclusion. Stop with the gimmicks, and catch up.
- Why innovation starts with the right mindset.
- Why there’s no innovation without experimentation.
If you want technical resources on the innovation process: UNHCR’s Innovation Resources Starter Kit
Breaking down the innovation jargon: UNHCR’s Innovation Glossary
What are the first steps for including innovation into your day-to-day work at UNHCR? Start with these: Practical tips for innovating in UNHCR
Discover what innovation actually looks like: The Humanitarian Innovation Process Video