Humanitarian innovation at the service of NGOs

The emergence of new materials, new means of production and the miniaturization of certain components have enabled many technological capabilities, previously inaccessible, to be tested by the greatest number of people. Blockchain, Virtual Reality or Additive Manufacturing are all tools that are looking for their applications.

By investing in these technologies, the main risk is that they will not resonate with users and will ultimately bring very little value to them, or even constrain them in their tasks.

The demining sector is one of the segments targeted by exploratory attempts of these emerging technologies. Surely you have heard of Humanitarian 3.0? In the current context, funding agencies and NGOs are increasingly looking for efficiency in order to achieve the objectives set by the States in terms of land clearance and release. It is therefore essential to be able to identify, among all these opportunities, those that will really bring value and those that will only be synonymous with wasting time.

Our challenge: to rethink the demining process alongside the humanitarian NGO Handicap International

• "How do I make a success of my innovation project in a sector as complex as mine clearance?"
• "How do I secure my investment by bringing maximum value to the land?"
• "How do you manage a project under extreme uncertainty?"

Innovating alongside a humanitarian NGO - Handicap International

Handicap International, an NGO and major player in the humanitarian field, invited us to take up the challenge of setting up an innovation project, in other words, a project in conditions of extreme uncertainty, in order to develop new activities that will facilitate and improve humanitarian demining. To do this, we spent 10 days with the actors of the demining ecosystem, in the field, to share their daily life, and thus take the full measure of the problems they encounter. Chad was chosen for this study and in particular the city of Faya-Largeau, the capital of the North, in the middle of the desert.

Innovation is about solving problems by imagining new solutions that will bring value to future users

(not to be confused with finding problems that could be solved by an existing solution)

The most important thing in this definition is not to find the solution but to identify the critical problem(s). In the framework of this study, we have deployed a theoretical approach coupled with a field approach aiming to identify the problems of demining actors among their different activities: planning of operations, demining/clearance, capitalization on the progress of work, reporting to the authorities.

During this work, our candid vision of demining has been invaluable in taking a maximum of distance and constantly questioning the
obvious. The latter represent, indeed, a frequent trap in the identification and understanding of pain points.

A controlled innovation process to move the project forward

We came back from this adventure with a lot of memories and a list of pain points as long as the arm. We are now working on characterizing them according to different parameters: the frustration generated, their criticality, the number of actors in the chain affected and the frequency with which they occur. The potential of a pain point is measured by the value it brings if it is resolved.

In summary, this first field immersion is :

- 12,000 km of travel

- 34 actors interviewed

- 21 hours of interviews conducted

- 50 points of pain identified

- A thorough understanding of the challenges of demining in Chad

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In the context of a humanitarian project in collaboration with an NGO, the value of the innovation is not directly measured by the financial profit generated by the sales of the new service or product.

Value is measured on two levels:

• the ability of teams to do their work in better conditions, more efficiently and above all with greater safety
• economic and social benefits for the country through the development of the populations

This first brick of identification and understanding of the pain points of actors in the field, in a humanitarian context, is part of a controlled innovation process that will take place over the year 2019. It is materialized by the innovation pyramid and aims to secure each stage of development. In innovation, failure does not come from the bad execution of the perfect plan but from the perfect execution of the bad plan. It is up to us to define the right plan!

Next step? To bring out technological solutions or

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