Paper details

Paper authors	Martha Thompson
In panel on	Responsible Innovation: One Step Forward-Two Steps Back
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Within the rapidly growing area of humanitarian innovation, a key gap persists around bringing the affected population into the innovation process as creative and active participants. We feel that responsible humanitarian innovation needs to include the participation of the end users in the development of innovative products, processes and systems. Participation has many different levels, ranging from different types of consultation to the co-design and co-creation of solutions processes which actively engage the affected populations’ experience, skills and creativity. MIT D-Lab has successfully tested co-design in grassroots communities in the development sector and found that people were 12 times more likely to adopt technologies when they were involved in the design and creation of those technologies. D-Lab is beginning to pilot co-creation in humanitarian arenas, adapting what we learned in the development field to see how the affected population could participate as agents in humanitarian innovation and what impact that would have on adoption. In humanitarian innovation the discussion of scale is largely around distribution not around adoption. We feel that the development of a participation index could furnish a useful tool in determining what levels of user participation in innovation have the greatest impact for developing successful solutions.

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