Managing innovation is terrifying. \u00a0It\u2019s terrifying for many different reasons, but here I\u2019ll 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 people.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s been a load of research carried out on the need for innovation in the humanitarian world. \u00a0Lots of private sector examples that we can\u2019t (realistically) follow, lots of commiserations, and cathartic conversations with colleagues across the sector who have also been charged with driving innovation. \u00a0But now it seems that there has been enough of a push, and innovation is here to stay…at least for a while.<\/p>\n
Innovation is the focus of the fourth pillar of the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 and is also on the radar of the UN Secretary General. Needless to say, it is now an area of focus and a recognised need. \u00a0There are good practices, good examples, and an increasing amount of data and information on Things That Worked and, more importantly, Things That Didn\u2019t. \u00a0We\u2019re now – as a sector – in more of a position to talk about innovation in that mystical place we call \u2018The Field\u2019. \u00a0But now that it\u2019s moved beyond a buzzword, and is now actually becoming a practice, these are the questions we now face:<\/p>\n
How do we manage it?<\/p>\n
Why should we manage it?<\/p>\n
Can it be managed?<\/p>\n
And what would that look like?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
For our team, the \u2018management\u2019 of innovation focused primarily on getting UNHCR Innovation off the ground. \u00a0This was painful, and it was extremely hard work. \u00a0We needed to have a strategy in place, we needed projects, we needed the ever elusive \u2018Quick Wins\u2019, and we needed co-opters within the organisation. \u00a0To add to all of that, we needed projects on the ground to verify, justify, and prove the theory and rhetoric.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s still a lot of the above to do – don\u2019t get me wrong – but we\u2019re now in the position of needing to manage a set of processes that we put in place over the course of the past two years. \u00a0We have Innovation Labs<\/a> – a virtual and real \u2018safe space\u2019 for experimentation. We also have Innovation Fellows<\/a>, an Innovation Fund that provides a budget for operations that want to prototype some of their ideas, an Innovation Circle, that consists of external friends, advisors, and supporters from a range of academic and corporate sector entities, and now, an Engagement and Communications pillar. \u00a0Each of these pillars of our work needs to be managed as a service to an organisation spanning 124 countries, over 8,500 staff and affiliates, and works with and for over 50 million displaced people. Managing this is not easy. \u00a0And managing a team to run this is not easy.<\/p>\n
In the 2015 Humanitarian Innovation Jam<\/a>\u00a0 that we\u2019re hosting together with Georgetown University, we\u2019re going to be talking about Innovation Management with a range of partners from across the globe. \u00a0This 2-day series of practical and interactive workshops will stimulate more dialogue, more consensus on the right tools for the sector, and it\u2019s going to help to further improve the way this sector engages, encourages, and manages innovation.<\/p>\n
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UNHCR Innovation’s challenges<\/b><\/p>\n
I wanted to talk about three challenges we\u2019ve faced over the past 2 years of our existence.<\/p>\n
1) Trying to position UNHCR Innovation as a complementary service to UNHCR operations. \u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n
It\u2019s become really important to communicate that innovation (as a practice) isn\u2019t siloed within the agency; it belongs to all divisions. UNHCR Innovation\u2019s role is to work together with UNHCR operations around the world to find more sustainable, more efficient ways to protect and assist refugees. That\u2019s why the first part of our three-step approach is to Amplify. We recognised that UNHCR has\/is\/will always be innovating, and so when we started, we placed greater emphasis on finding and amplifying the innovations that already exist within the agency, and on the connecting role that our team could play. \u00a0We wanted to be able to find the innovations and innovators and make fruitful connections between things and people that were already working. \u00a0Finally, Innovation wanted to seek to explore, and to match external expertise with internal expertise, in order to create healthy feedback loops, and ultimately the best solutions that the world could offer.<\/p>\n
2) Trying to remain agile, responsive, and relevant within set rules that protect the (largely) publicly funded UNHCR. <\/b><\/p>\n
There\u2019s a fine line between being agile, and being swallowed by bureaucratic impediments. \u00a0Have we managed to remain all of the above? \u00a0Yes and no. \u00a0We\u2019ve made a ton of mistakes. \u00a0At times we\u2019ve been almost too agile, and have moved ahead without being as consultative as we perhaps should have been. \u00a0At times we\u2019ve been too bureaucratic, and tried to \u2018manage\u2019 too much, which can stifle members of the team, which then becomes a problem. \u00a0What we\u2019ve arrived at is maintaining a set of engagement processes that differ across field operations, divisions at headquarters, and external partners. We\u2019re constantly iterating, learning from, and improving how we engage. \u00a0We\u2019re not there yet, and there will undoubtedly be more mistakes and lessons learned along the way.<\/p>\n
3) Measuring success…and failure.<\/b><\/p>\n
We\u2019ve spent a lot of time as a team developing indicators in order to measure and compare successes and failures at the project level, Lab level, and at the team level. \u00a0As with everything else we do, we\u2019re very much treating these indicators as prototypes that we will test, and iterate. Once we have a set of core indicators that cover these three levels, it will make future resource allocations and performance management a lot easier. \u00a0Ultimately we want to be as accountable and as transparent as we can be – for and to Refugees.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
So, how could technology help?
\n<\/b><\/p>\nQuite early on we set out to find the perfect management tool. \u00a0This naturally drew us to online platforms. \u00a0We wanted tools that we could use with external organisations because partnership collaboration is a core part of our approach. We try to blend external expertise and core competencies with internal expertise and core competencies. \u00a0Project teams – both internal and external often work across different countries, continents, and time-zones. While one person is waking up, \u00a0another person is eating lunch, and someone else is rattling along a dusty road on the way to a refugee camp. \u00a0What this means is that we also need to have flexible project management tools. \u00a0We agreed that project managers should choose their own tool for organizing their workplans, as long as they could keep track of how projects progress, and to try to avoid (or at least side-step) pain points and roadblocks. \u00a0Most recently we partnered with Podio.com<\/a> under their not-for-profit partnership.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve been given free access to Podio.com for our team, which is an insanely generous contribution to UNHCR\u2019s Innovation cause. It\u2019s another high-quality tool that we can offer our team, and I really like it because it interacts pretty much seamlessly with tools that we already use – Google Drive for our online repository of documents and knowledge, and Outlook as our mail client, for example. \u00a0Once it\u2019s set-up, you can try out a range of different app add-ons to suit whichever project you\u2019re running. \u00a0I\u2019m currently using it to put together our 2015 strategy, as it happens.<\/p>\n
So did we find the perfect tool for project management in UNHCR Innovation? \u00a0No. Nor should we seek to. \u00a0What we\u2019ve found is that different tools work better or worse for different combinations of people and organisations. \u00a0This doesn\u2019t mean that we have non-uniform processes across the different Innovation Labs for example, but it does mean that the tools we use to monitor and drive processes are and can be different.<\/p>\n
And we\u2019re always searching for more tools to test and to try out with our internal and external partners. \u00a0What challenges do you face in managing humanitarian innovation. How is technology helping you to do that more efficiently?<\/p>\n