O0YQ5

Insights on Innovation
27
Innovation has been one of War Child Holland’s four strategic objectives
since 2010, but what constitutes ’innovation’ has been hotly debated within
the organisation.
We distinguish between two types of innovation. The first is longer-term, focused
and strategic, emphasising the end goal such as greater impact or sector-wide
change. The second, more inclusive definition creates room for employees to
engage with the concept and, thus, become familiar with what innovating is all
about. We agree with the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ quite
inclusive definition, which allows room for both ‘game-changing’ and incremental
innovation.
Most importantly, for War Child, innovation is about working with other
stakeholders to create greater impact. Our organisational agenda is quite simple
– to improve the lives of children in regions affected by conflict. We believe that
innovative approaches, when carefully applied, have the potential to significantly
increase our impact.
" The only real
mistake is
the one from
which we learn
nothing."
Henry Ford
In Sudan, for example, there are over two million children without access to
education, a large percentage of whom will most likely never set foot within
a classroom. War Child and its partners, Ahfad University for Women and
TNO, together with the Sudanese Ministry of Education, are working to bring
relevant education opportunities to children eager to learn. We are doing this
with a curriculum-based e-learning game which children can access at village
level. UNICEF International has chosen this project as one of five UNICEF
“Innovation in Education” projects worldwide. Projects which UNICEF believes
have transformative potential and address issues of equity and access, while
strengthening education systems and delivering strong learning outcomes.
In this project we have taken a structured approach to innovation from the
beginning. What do we mean by this? We have developed our innovation
hypothesis quite carefully, i.e. what is the impact we think we can achieve with our
new approach? We have not been afraid of failure, but have sought to mitigate risk
through careful project design. We seek to differentiate between hypothesis-testing
which could produce a negative result, and failure resulting from incompetence,
which is just not acceptable.
It is, of course, imperative to share experiences of failure with others. Analysing
reasons for failure in this manner results in organisational, or even better – sector-wide
learning. We should not ‘celebrate’ failure as such, but share our experiences in order
to learn. We firmly believe there is a role for greater transparency about how and why
a project fails and why innovations have succeeded. When innovating, both success
and failure are stepping stones to delivering greater impact.
Kate Radford, Innovation Programme Manager, War Child Holland.
Camille Lemouchoux, Head of Quality, Accountability and Learning, War
Child Holland.