innov-aid

How is innovation implemented?

Types and modalities of humanitarian innovation

Because innovations are about altering entire approaches, it can be hard to categorize individual projects. Innovations can involve introducing new tools, including medicines, technologies, software or vehicles, new processes, including internal management, partnerships and coordination, new approaches to gathering, analyzing and storing information and much more. To digest the different opportunities and challenges, a rough classifications along those lines can help.

• System: Innovative approaches, partnerships and processes
  
  Some innovations are not specific to new equipment, tools or technologies, but concern the way in which humanitarian aid is coordinated, managed and even conceived off. This also entails partnerships and collaborations with new actors (e.g. regional authorities or the private sector), methods for determining how and where aid should be delivered, assessment and M&E methodologies and system-wide changes, such as “HXL” the humanitarian exchange standard, which is eventually intended to be followed by all aid organizations.

• Tools: Innovative products, services and hardware
  
  The variety of tools used in humanitarian aid is huge, and thus is the room for innovation, reaching from building better machines or vehicles, to developing highly nutritious foods, to using new technologies such as mobile phones or drones and to using sensors to understand/analyze the situation.

• Information: Innovative data collection, analysis and knowledge sharing
  
  New technologies and new approaches fall together in a third distinct way and impact the way that many organizations over see their communications and information management. To a large extend the increasing popularity and affordability of information communication technologies (ICTs) is pushing organizations to include new methods and modalities in their word (e.g. cash delivery via mobile phones and data collection with tablets), and at the same time new expectations for accountability and transparency as well as system-wide sharing of data and information is changing how information is gathered and disseminated.