If you step back and look at the history of innovation practices, it quickly becomes clear that there isn't just one type of innovation problem and that there isn't one 'best' innovation practice.  Over the last 50 years, a series of different approaches to innovation have been developed, each tailored to the major creative challenges of the day.  

Once you have a promising and successful pilot, the natural next question is 'How can I get this out in the world and scale its success?"   This is a driving concern for almost every innovator, but has a particular urgency for innovators working humanitarian and development aid.  Live literally depend on their innovations scaling up and delivering real world impact.  

One of the things that most infuriates organizational executives about current innovators is the innovator's insistence that you can't plan and measure progress for their work.  The rather cheeky message to leadership is that 'what we're doing is so agile and unpredictable, that you just have to trust us to end up in a good spot'.   

Often when you find that it's difficult to have a coherent discussion on a subject, the underlying reason is because there is unrecognized complexity in the subject.  As a result one person starts talking about one aspect of the problem, and then another person seems to go off in an entirely different direction.  It can be frustrating because these complex issues often require serious thought and strategic work.   

The power of Ecosystem Innovation lies in its ability to 'assemble' people, organizations, resources, and technology into systems that do big complex things.  There is a lot of strategic thinking that goes into imagining what kinds of 'Lego' blocks need to be put together to do a hard job, but that isn't then end of the challenge.  

Every year the CDAC Network brings together a range of original thinkers to explore difficult, messy challenges confronting humanitarian action.  In 2020 during the early months of the global Covid pandemic, I had the privilege of virtually attending this conference and recording the ideas that were presented.  

The topic under discussion was the role technology should play in humanitarian action and the extent to which it improved outcomes or actually reinforced deeply embedded issues of white privilege and amplified inequality among those receiving aid.  The thought leaders challenged the easy assumptions about the benefits of both Western led aid missions and the value of technology to solve problems in humanitarian action.

Innovators often create a valuable new idea, but then run into a wall when it comes to paying the bills.  As a result, finding a viable financial business model is a key challenge during both development of a new idea and over the long run as the innovation takes its place out in the world.  

These challenges are particularly felt by innovators working outside established commercial markets.  This includes, social impact entrepreneurs, aid sector innovators, and others working in environments where the 'user' of an innovation is often in a poor position to pay for the value they receive.

This report, developed for the START Network, explores opportunities for pushing beyond conventional innovation support models.  Leveraging hands-on insights from the DEPP Innovation lab initiative in Kenya, Jordan, Bangladesh and the Philippines, it challenges what may seem to be an obvious assumption … that doing more for humanitarian and development sector innovation requires direct investment in programs that support innovators in their work.

In 2015, the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals were released.  They embodied a key strategy of ecosystem innovators, setting ambitious targets that will drive system level change.  In the years since their release, the 17 "SDG's" have provided a focus for ambitious change in poverty, justice, health, climate and more. 

The 2011 publication of Eric Res' book, The Lean Startup, solidified an approach to innovation based on Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial approach to developing mobile apps and other digital products.   Innovators were told to develop light weight pilots (minimum viable products), and then test them

How do you assess the health of an innovation program and its ability to generate impactful and successful innovations?  If you're a commercial investor, over time the financial return of the selected investments may be a satisfactory proxy for the investments you've made.  

A lot of people, even those trained in the field, think that innovation is just one set of practices.  That's not the case.  How you do innovation depends on the kind of challenge you face.  And as a result, over the last 70 years, three very different methodologies have been widely adopted.  Today a fourth approach, Ecosystem Innovation, is emerging in response to the need to tackle complex and fast moving challenges in business and the world around us. 

It’s a truism that “in a crisis, time is of the essence”.   This plays out on a real world stage when floods, draughts, conflict, or other disasters disrupt and sometimes devastate communities.  In the past, action on these humanitarian crises was often delayed until events were already well underway.