Call for proposals: Learning from failure (Humanitarian Innovation Fund) – Remote

OVERVIEW

To innovate means to test a series of assumptions or ideas that don’t work until you find one that does. Failure is an inherent outcome of innovation projects.1 There are different kinds of failure: ‘good failure’ where you can “fail quickly, safely and cheaply; spend a little to learn a lot”, as opposed to ‘bad failure’ which could be the end of a start-up organisation.

Through our Humanitarian Innovation Fund, we have accompanied over 140 innovations on their journey of innovation, adaption and delivery. We have supported innovators as they explored and researched the problems they had identified and provided resources and expert support as they developed and tested prototypes. And finally, for those who have made it to pilot and proven their innovation to be effective, we have created opportunities to tackle some of the most intransigent barriers as identified in our Too Tough to Scale report.

As we accompanied these innovations on their journey, we observed some would complete their project with us and moved on, scaling or evolving into different interventions, but for many others the journey ended. What stopped them making the leap from well-evidenced innovation to achieving impact at scale? Was it something within their control or did the humanitarian innovation system they operate in impose a point of failure? We know the weak results culture and the lack of a well- developed evidence base has a major effect on scaling efforts and places limitations on decisions about diffusion and adoption.2

OBJECTIVE

We would like to bring together the collective intelligence and experience of the innovation community and the wider humanitarian system to explore this point of failure between piloting and impact at scale. To ask:

• What does impact at scale mean for different actors in the humanitarian system? How to they define scale? What are the attitudes and assumptions of different actors in humanitarian innovation towards failure to scale?
• Building on the findings from Humanitarian Procurement Challenges and Tactics Adopting Humanitarian Innovation what are the system wide points of failure for humanitarian innovation to achieve impact at scale?
• What are the possible approaches to navigating these points of failure? Is there ‘good failure’ at scale?
• How does the approach a funder takes impact an innovation’s ability to navigate failure to scale? How can humanitarian funders anticipate and support innovators to find new paths to navigate failure?
• What tools / networks / data / insight would be helpful to support effective innovations to pivot well and navigate identify new paths to scale?

TIMELINE

The intended start date is March 2024 and the final report is due at the beginning of June 2024.