While UN organizations have long been criticized for its bureaucracy, risk-aversion, and relatively slow adoption of technology, UNICEF has been paving the way for social innovation. It has transformed its strategy to embrace open innovation, and to establish strong partnerships across the public, private, and non-profit sectors. These changes have in turn led to faster and wider-scale deployment of its relief efforts to children around the world.<\/p>\n
Impetus for novel approaches to humanitarian aid<\/strong><\/p>\n Over the past decade, the humanitarian sector has come to adopt innovation from the private sector for process improvement as well as product innovation. Innovative approaches to humanitarian aid have become increasingly important as the cost of international humanitarian aid has risen more than three-fold over the past decade, and victims of humanitarian crises have nearly doubled [1]. Agility, speed, and scale are vital to tackle global problems such as climate change, disease outbreaks such as Ebola and Zika, persistent poverty, and refugee crises unfolding across the world.<\/p>\n Moreover, the environment in which humanitarian crises unfold has shifted from rural to urban and from short to longer time frames [2]. With these changes, connectivity and access to information have become critical tools both for UNICEF as well as for crisis-affected populations [3]. \u00a0In the face of these challenges, various social innovations have been developed to enable humanitarian aid to be deployed more effectively and efficiently.<\/p>\n Innovation at UNICEF<\/strong><\/p>\n UNICEF launched its Office of Innovation in 2006 as an interdisciplinary, open innovation platform responsible for sourcing, prototyping, and scaling technologies that will enhance UNICEF\u2019s aid efforts. Importantly, UNICEF has also made innovation a part of their organizational strategy [4]. At the Innovation Unit within their Supply Division, this culture of innovation has transformed the way UNICEF\u2019s supply chain is overcoming logistical constraints, reducing supplier lead times, and designing new products [5].<\/p>\n Key to this endeavor has been the partnerships that UNICEF has formed with the private sector, academia, civil society, and government. For example, during the Zika outbreak in 2016, UNICEF Brazil partnered with Facebook in order to identify at-risk communities based on anonymized data of Facebook posts regarding the disease. As a result, UNICEF was able to design a highly targeted campaign to provide useful information about Zika for vulnerable communities. This campaign was a major success, as survey results showed that 82% of those whom UNICEF reached out to took preventative action [6].<\/p>\n In 2015, the UNICEF Innovation Fund was created to fund early stage start-ups with open-source technology. The Fund has raised nearly $14.4 million so far, with three key portfolio areas: products for youth, real-time information, and infrastructure [7]. As a result of this open innovation platform, UNICEF has developed innovations such as mobile birth registration in Nigeria and drone transportation of blood samples for early infant HIV diagnosis in Malawi [8]. In the short and medium term, UNICEF will continue to invest in the Innovation Fund. In particular, it aims to strengthen innovation leveraging block-chain, fintech, wearables, 3D-printing, and other groundbreaking technologies [9].<\/p>\n Going forward<\/strong><\/p>\n In the short term, UNICEF needs to establish a set of operational norms and guidelines in order to guarantee that they \u2018Do no harm\u2019, which they identify as a key principle. Innovation necessitates experimentation. However, UNICEF works with the most vulnerable children around the world, who should not be seen as a fertile testing ground for innovation. This risk of exploitation is further heightened as data is central to all of the frontier technologies, and yet children have limited control over their personal data.<\/p>\n Moreover, UNICEF should design a systematic open-innovation process that meets context-specific needs. While open innovation is an effective channel for ideation, implementation of these ideas is highly challenging given the volatile environments within which UNICEF operates. Therefore, UNICEF needs to ensure that deep local expertise is constantly fed into the innovation process in order to maximize impact and minimize unintended consequences.<\/p>\n In the medium term, UNICEF should develop a repository of data and key learnings that are also open to the public. Due to its scale and geographical reach, UNICEF is in a unique position to become a hub for social innovation across the world. Building a database and codification of past learnings not only helps to diffuse the technology and further spur other innovation, but also ensures that UNICEF remains transparent and accountable. UNICEF can also benefit from building a \u201ccollaborative community\u201d of innovators that share and build on this cumulative knowledge, and are driven by motivations to be part of a greater societal cause [10].<\/p>\n As UNICEF invests more in open innovation, they become more susceptible to external interests that do not share the same moral imperative. Can this moral imperative be sustained as UNICEF continues to expand open-innovation? If so, how?<\/p>\n [Word count: 792]<\/p>\n [1] Alexander Betts and Louise Bloom, \u201cHumanitarian Innovation: The State of the Art\u201d, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Occasional Policy Paper<\/em>, November 2014, pp.6<\/p>\n [2] Alexander Betts and Louise Bloom, \u201cHumanitarian Innovation: The State of the Art\u201d, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Occasional Policy Paper<\/em>, November 2014, pp.6<\/p>\n [3] Alexander Betts and Louise Bloom, \u201cHumanitarian Innovation: The State of the Art\u201d, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Occasional Policy Paper<\/em>, November 2014, pp.6<\/p>\n [4] Louise Bloom and Romily Faulkner, \u201cInnovation Spaces: Lessons from the United Nations\u201d, Third World Quarterly<\/em>, Vol.37, No.8, (2016):1371-1387, via Hollis, Accessed November 2018<\/p>\n [5] Jarrod Goentzel, \u201cSupply Chain Innovation Critical in Ebola Response\u201d, Supply Chain Management Review<\/em>, (Jan\/Feb 2015): 6-7<\/p>\n [6] Erica Koichi, \u201cHow innovation in data generation can contribute to social good\u201d, unicefstories, December 10, 2016. http:\/\/unicefstories.org\/2016\/12\/10\/how-innovation-in-data-generation-can-contribute-to-social-good\/<\/a> Accessed November 2018<\/p>\n [7] UNICEF, \u201cUNICEF Innovation Fund\u201d, https:\/\/unicefinnovationfund.org\/#\/about<\/a>, Accessed November 2018<\/p>\n [8] UNICEF, \u201cInnovation at UNICEF\u201d, https:\/\/www.unicef.org\/innovation\/innovation_73197.html<\/a>, Accessed November 2018<\/p>\n