101

Last week our hundreth member joined innov-aid - welcome Erini, nice to see you back in this space from a new perspective.  This reminded me of the power of network and how each of us brings along our expertise and perspectives on humanitarian innovation.  It's now almost a year since we quietly opened up this group on the back of calls for common places to link-up in around humanitarian innovation between face to face encounters.  We have been encouraged by how much the members have used it as a reference resource, but we see also how challenging it is for us all to make the time to proactively search for partnership and inspiration from the work of others and to share our experience and lessons.  

To me the year since the first Oxford Humanitarian innovation conference seems like one where there has been a lot of consolidation of expertise and evidence-gathering by those with a specific focus on humanitarian innovation. In the next year it would be great if we could turn some of our collective energy outwards to use our respective networks to ensure innovation thinking becomes widely embedded in the challenges thrown up by our operational work; and that we bring in more pro-actively other kinds of innovative thinkers from beyond the sector.  To explore this further, I hope to see some of you soon in person at our session on 'Building community - networking our networks' at next week's second Oxford Humanitarian Innovation conference.