Harnessing the power of the crowd for humanitarian innovation

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The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was established in Geneva more than 150 years ago and its founder, Henry Dunant, was the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Today, this impartial, independent organisation still has its headquarters in Switzerland and continues its laudable humanitarian mission to protect and assist the victims of armed conflict.

Wars in Syria, Yemen, Mali, South Sudan and numerous other trouble spots around the world bring danger and suffering for trapped civilians, and peril and misery for displaced refugees – all on a huge scale. So the ICRC’s work is more vital than ever.

While terrible humanitarian crises remain a horrifying constant, the world is in a state of flux. New models are emerging in the commercial sphere to disrupt markets and turn old processes upside down, while developments in technology, communication, collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing also have profound implications for the third sector. In the humanitarian space, ICRC is leading the way in harnessing fresh approaches for insight.

This is in no way a superficial exercise. The ICRC has the bold aim of reinventing the way it tackles innovation to improve the provision of humanitarian aid. At the heart of these efforts is innovation adviser Tarun Sarwal, who moved to the ICRC’s Swiss head office in 2009, after four years at the British Red Cross. There he had worked on innovations such as ‘cash programming’ – which provides money for victims on the ground as part of emergency relief measures – in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

“The ICRC wanted me to bring this kind of methodology and thinking within the institution here,” says Sarwal. “After a while, I got a sense that there were many things the ICRC could be doing that are more relevant to people, because people’s expectations have changed and technology has changed. It became clear that we needed to democratise innovation. You might call it bottom-up, or ‘coalface’, innovation, but we needed to be closer to the beneficiaries and to the frontline workers.”

The answer was to create a platform of ideas to source needs from workers in the field – who, being in the midst of crisis situations, were best placed to articulate the nature of the problems on the ground. Once these had been identified, solutions could be crowdsourced.

Making this work was far easier said than done. It was not merely a case of meeting the technical challenges of an ideation platform, but of building and galvanising a community around it. After assessing several alternatives, ICRC turned to open-innovation specialist 100%Open and its Geneva-based sister agency Catalyx. Sarwal says key reasons for the choice were the community management expertise they offered and the understanding that “there was as much importance in doing things offline as online”.

The platform was given the name RED Innovation and went live early in 2015. Workers in the field were asked to post about the big challenges they faced. The problems identified as most important were then taken on to the ‘needs’ phase (see box) with solutions requested from the community.

Breaking down hierarchies

“The brainstorming of solutions can come from anywhere, and can be much richer because of it,” says Catalyx managing director, Guy White. “A number of the needs that were uncovered in the pilot stage last year weren’t on the ICRC’s agenda. It hadn’t thought about them as something important to focus on. So it is opening up that dialogue, breaking down the hierarchies and allowing organisations to be much more creative and bold in what they are looking to do. I don’t think there are any other organisations exploring this method.”

White and Sarwal agree that some cultural change is required for an organisation such as ICRC to succeed with this approach. As Sarwal points out, ICRC remains very hierarchical and has standardised operational processes that make it possible to deliver aid at scale. Moreover, for workers operating in danger zones, absolute clarity and consistency – coupled with scrupulous impartiality – is necessary when it comes to explaining what they are doing and why. This is a somewhat different mindset from the openness and collaborative nature of crowdsourced ideation.

“For me, that was probably the biggest change,” says Sarwal. “It is only when you go outside and understand what other people are doing – and you pick up new ideas – that change begins to happen. It is very difficult to bring innovation around when you are talking to the same people all the time.”

By the end of 2015, nine months after start-up, RED Innovation had built a community of 633 people from 127 countries. Alongside ICRC staff, the community embraces other parts of the Red Cross movement, corporate partners, people from different humanitarian agencies, and companies active in the sector.

In the first phase, 86 ‘needs’ were identified, and an ICRC summer workshop selected eight challenges as areas of focus. These elicited an impressive 114 ideas from the community. Another workshop at the Geneva headquarters pinpointed the ideas that merited further development. Prototypes for ways these could be taken forward as practical, real-world solutions were uploaded to the platform.

One challenge caught the attention of CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research – famous for its giant particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, and birthplace of the World Wide Web. CERN has an offshoot called The Port, which brings together interdisciplinary teams from different organisations to work on projects that deliver humanitarian technology or other benefits to society.

The Port organised a Hackathon in October to explore making stronger, more cost-effective bags for airdropping emergency supplies. “This Hackathon, with a whole bunch of students and CERN scientists, actually came out with a brand-new-to-the-world, robust, reusable bag” says White. “It is going to do fantastic things in the world of airdrop materials.”

Internal discussions

In addition to the superbags, challenges to be developed further include: ‘Hotline in a Box’ – a prototype to provide a free and open-source toolkit for the rapid deployment of hotline services; Off Grid Amazon – stemming from the merger of the Re-energise and Light-in-dark-places challenges, for which ICRC worked with UN agencies, the Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) Network and other humanitarian groups on a pilot to build a platform for off-grid energy solutions; and use in the field of palm-scanning technology, developed by Fujitsu, to scan the vein map of a hand, which is unique to each person.

The Social Media Communications and Re-Connections challenges have also triggered internal discussions about developing a digital network of movement volunteers, and led ICRC to explore more efficient ways of connecting people to restore family links.

“In the Red Cross, we have millions of volunteers,” says Sarwal. “This is one of the strengths of our movement. Each set of volunteers is managed by a branch or by a country, and one of the ideas was, ‘can we digitise the way they work?’ If people can connect through their smartphones, or through their ordinary phones, and have a platform where they can supply and verify information, they can work as a swarm to respond to an emergency.

“It’s a huge idea. It can change the way work is organised, but I imagine it would also be a very important tool to get support from new volunteers. Again, it’s only when you get these bits and pieces of ideas that people have, and put them together, that you get something quite as big.”

As well as answering specific needs, RED Innovation has been instrumental in unearthing useful new contacts and forming relationships, both across the movement and with other organisations. The platform has created conversations between Geneva and Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, the US, New Zealand, the UK, Nepal, Liberia, Afghanistan and India, and has raised awareness of issues such as urban violence and sexual violence against men.

Opening minds

These achievements have cleared a path for further innovation initiatives. Sarwal says the Hackathon “opened our minds to how much the crowd can give, and is willing to give”. As a result, a complementary platform to RED Innovation has been developed, with a more specific focus on the creation of assistive products and devices, to help people with physical disabilities.

Enable Makeathon – which bears the subtitle ‘Ideation to Impact’ – is, in essence, a large-scale hackathon, launched in late 2015, which began as a 60-day programme to solicit ideas internationally online, but which also featured offline workshops in Bangalore, India. The first wave triggered around 150 ideas, about 10% of which were taken forward to the prototype stage in a co-creation process.

“We had this fantastic outcome with 15 or 16 new products made, which have become ready for the market in such a short time,” says Sarwal. “That has been a real learning, because innovation usually takes quite a long time.”

As well as speeding up the product innovation process, Sarwal contends that Enable Makeathon allows products to be created for a fraction of the cost of the traditional approach to research and development (R&D).

In a similar vein, ICRC is exploring the possibilities, in a humanitarian context, of the international ‘FabLab’ movement. Fabrication Laboratories are workshops for the digital creation of products using 3D printing and laser cutting, and they make it possible to build prototype products extremely quickly.

With the launch of its Global Humanitarian Lab – which, at the time of writing, was being set up in Geneva – ICRC is partnering with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organisations to invest in making potentially life-saving products more easily available, where they are needed most.

A prototype developed in Geneva – or at a networked FabLab elsewhere in the world – could potentially be delivered immediately to where it is needed. At the push of a button, a 3D printer many miles away in a troubled location could spring into life. The falling cost of the technology makes this an increasingly viable option. David Ott, senior innovation analyst at ICRC, is leading the Global Humanitarian Lab project.

Collaboration with other humanitarian agencies here, and elsewhere, is fundamental going forward. “In the corporate sector, you compete in your innovation,” says Sarwal. “But, in our sector, it doesn’t make sense to do that.

“If a private source or a donor source funds Unicef to produce a new solar lamp, it makes no sense to fund UNHCR and ICRC to do the same thing. It makes sense for us to share things.”

There is no doubting Sarwal’s passion for the humanitarian opportunities being created through crowdsourcing, a trend he calls “Uber-isation”. As a fan of technology, he admits to still getting a kick from using an app to summon a cab in downtown Geneva.

But there is an argument to be made that it’s Sarwal and his colleagues who should be hailed, for making an organisation that is more than a century and a half old into a frontrunner for using open innovation to improve the lives of those unfortunate enough to be caught up in conflict and disaster.