More than Laboratories

Abstract

When former Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon encouraged the humanitarian sector to innovate and create a new paradigm to respond to people in crisis, the sector answered with an unbridled number of new enterprises and laboratories to create tools, products and new initiatives. As these emerged, so did the reality of the changing complexity of communities in need of humanitarian assistance. The deterioration of the natural physical environment, along with burgeoning population dynamics and threats to humanitarian workers themselves, has tipped the balance of complexity beyond the capability of the system to respond effectively. The humanitarian sector as a whole must urgently commit to reconciling four critical challenges to reinvent itself and its effectiveness: reconciling the meaning of innovation; developing an overarching strategy that addresses the radically changing global context in which communities require assistance; agreeing on an integrated structure to deliver innovation; and addressing how innovation is financed. Unless the sector addresses these four elements, the action and effect of innovation will fail to realise the transformational change necessary, to respond to communities in crisis now and in the future.

Innovation in humanitarian assistance—a systematic literature review

“…A pressing issue related to the meaning of innovation for the sector is therefore Bruder and Baar Journal of International Humanitarian Action (2024) 9:2 to resolve the question of who the 'customer' of the innovation is. For most humanitarian agencies, the donor is the customer and the community where the innovation is applied is the beneficiary (Finnigan and Farkas 2019). As such, innovators provide the best value proposition as perceived by the customer, i.e.…”

“…Given the increasing needs, and the pressure on the scarce resources available to address them, there has been a recognition within the humanitarian sector of the necessity for radical change to deliver better aid (Chandran 2015;Finnigan and Farkas 2019;Ramalingam 2013). Consequently, over the past decade, the humanitarian sector has begun investing more heavily in innovation, seeking new and more efficient solutions to address humanitarian crises and narrow the funding gap in the sector.…”