The Oral History of RIL’s 2016-2026
with Dan McClure
Dan McClure is one of the founding conceptual architects behind RIL. A self-described “pragmatic optimist”, Dan remains “excited and buzzy about all the things that can happen” in a fast changing dynamic world, while recognising that making those possibilities real requires hard work and a willingness to embrace complexity. His contribution to RIL has centred on pushing the boundaries of innovation practice and asking what it takes to make innovation work in messy, real-world environments.
RIL was born to “fill up the messy middle”
Looking back at RIL’s beginnings in 2015–16, Dan recalls how “innovation had become a thing in the aid sector”, with innovation teams and funding programmes being widely implemented and funding lots of creative pilot projects. It was a welcome shift for a sector that had lagged behind on innovation investment. Yet many of those promising ideas were not growing, scaling or being adopted.
Dan recalled how large donors and innovation leaders started to bemoan the spread of “pilotitus”. His metaphor was even more vivid:
“We were birthing a bunch of baby bunnies, and none of the baby bunnies ever grew up.”
The problem was not that people lacked ideas or energy. Rather, the sector had become good at developing and testing relatively small innovations, but had not yet figured out what happened when those innovations encountered the complexity of real-world systems.
As an innovation specialist, Dan was pushing for a different approach: moving away from fast, low-cost pilots towards complex system innovation.
“We needed to fill up the messy middle.”
It was in this context that Dan, Kim Scriven and Jenny Wilde came together at an innovation conference in Berkeley California, hosted by OCHA. Each was approaching humanitarian innovation from a different angle, and together they began whiteboarding what would become the RIL model.
Listen to the clip to hear the story.
Initially called the Crisis Response Innovation Lab, the name later became Response Innovation Labs. As the model evolved, it became clear that its purpose extended beyond crisis response.
“It was that you were taking on messier problems, that you were recognising what the context was, that you were engaging the network of people around you.”
With so many innovations in the aid sector struggled to scale, the opportunity for RIL was to imagine a new type of innovation lab, designed to work with complex, messy, real-life situations rather than simply develop new ideas.
What makes RIL RIL? Three defining features
For Dan, three things came to define RIL.
First, RIL embraced the “missing middle” between a promising pilot and something that could work at scale. The challenge was not simply to generate another promising idea, but to understand what happens when innovations encounter the complexity of the real world.
Second, RIL was grounded in context. It worked on the ground, built relationships within local ecosystems, and saw innovation as something that happens through communities and partnerships, rather than in a lab or incubator.
Third, RIL brought a sense of collective urgency and dynamism to innovation. Rather than developing ideas in isolation and thinking about implementation later, RIL connected innovation to real-world needs, people and environments from the outset.
RIL’s role: shaped by and evolving with reality
Dan sees an important distinction between the innovation practices that influenced the sector at the time and the work RIL was beginning to explore. Widely used “Lean Startup” approaches that featured “fail fast” pilots were largely about discovering inventions: testing an idea, learning quickly and iterating. RIL was asking a different question:
“How do you evolve something that’s complex, on the ground, and messy?”
This was a question that RIL was brave enough to ask itself. Over time, RIL itself continued to evolve alongside the sector. For Dan, this is one of RIL’s strengths.
“Innovation labs can be un-innovative when it comes to themselves.”
He is excited by how RIL has continued to ask what the new challenges are and what new practices are needed. Looking ahead, he sees an increasing role for what he calls an “innovation choreographer”: someone who can step back and see the complexity of a big problem and help bring together the different people, organisations and resources needed to address it; someone who can create something dynamic and impactful out in a world that is messy and chaotic; and a powerful storyteller for what the future could look like.
“Choreographers are going to be at the centre of complex innovations that assemble multiple parts.”
For Dan, this is a leadership role that could be increasingly relevant to RIL’s contribution to the innovation ecosystem: recognising complexity, bringing different players together and helping unlock opportunities that no single actor could create alone.
“Everyone gets a pony"
Humanitarian actors, including RIL, are increasingly seeking partnerships with the private sector. Dan is careful not to position himself as a private-sector specialist. But he does see an important lesson for the humanitarian sector as it tries to engage more deeply with private-sector actors.
“If you're going to ask to do partnerships with somebody, you've got to understand them deeply enough so that you can figure out how they get a pony, and how you get a pony. … In fact, everyone who's participating in an innovation has to get a pony.”
For Dan, this is not simply about financial incentives. Different forms of private-sector engagement require different value propositions. A loan, a capital partnership and a donation are not interchangeable, and each involves different expectations and motivations.
The narrative also matters. Humanitarian organisations often talk about gaps and pain points, while private-sector actors may be more accustomed to thinking about opportunity and growth.
For Dan, the shift is from asking someone to fund an important problem to asking why they should be a partner in solving it. And his advice for developing that understanding is simple:
“Go talk to people. Just spend time listening to people who are outside your group. Talk to people and actually listen to what they say in response.”
Building systems in places where systems still need to be built
“How do we scale the capacity to do complex innovation? How do we find ways to make complex, hard problems something that we can identify and go after effectively?
… RIL is an organisation that's designed to take on that problem.”
In established environments, many of the systems needed to make an innovation work are already in place. In lower-resource environments, pieces of that machinery may be missing. An innovation may therefore require not only a new product or idea, but also new partnerships, infrastructure, capacity and connections around it.
That is where Dan sees great future opportunities for RIL.
“You’ve got to be thinking about building a system with a whole bunch of different people and organisations and resources all coming together. That’s what RIL can really help excel at.”