Practical Guide
Setting Up Coordination Platforms for Humanitarian Innovation
This Practical Guide is adapted from a resource originally developed through RIL’s strategic support to DRA and Innovation Focal Points across various Joint Responses. It provides an overview of several archetypes of innovation coordination and collaboration platforms, together with indicative information on the resources and requirements associated with each. The guide aims to support organisations in identifying and establishing platforms that are appropriate to their ambitions, available resources, and operating contexts. It also serves as a practical reference for actors across the wider ecosystem to assess the resources required to establish and sustain platforms that respond to their strategic priorities and local operational realities.
Why Does Innovation Support in Humanitarian Contexts Need A Coordination Platform?
Innovation is inherently a collaborative process. Unlike the image of the lonely genius creating a revolutionary breakthrough in their garage, innovations that scale—especially social innovations—are the product of engagement and partnerships with a diverse range of actors and stakeholders across an ecosystem that enables connections and information exchange. In tech hubs around the world, industries, investors and governments support in these ecosystems through facilities (research centres, workspaces, fab labs, etc..), events (tech summits, innovation expos, hackathons, etc..) and capital (venture funds, tax credits, fellowships).
In places where a humanitarian response is active, and particularly in countries facing chronic instability and protracted crises, these ecosystems may not be fully functional. As a result, actors looking for better solutions (government, LNGOs, INGOs, UN) may not be able to connect with innovations that could solve their challenges. In other words, supply and demand are not being connected effectively.
Dedicated innovation platforms—from informal meet-ups to comprehensive hubs—can help build up or reinforce these struggling ecosystems by improving the flow of information and making it easier for organisations and people to connect.
Humanitarian implementers are well positioned to launch such platforms. Sitting at the intersection of demand and supply, they hold the technical expertise to understand challenges and assess solutions, maintain direct links to the crisis-affected communities, and often have access to global resources. As central actors in the humanitarian innovation ecosystem, they can leverage their existing credibility and connections to convene other stakeholders to take part in the work of a new platform.
Considerations When Establishing a Platform
Operating Environment
Both ecosystem maturity and the nature of the coordination gap matter. In emerging ecosystems, where actors and agendas are still forming, even light structures can bring actors together and create space for collective action. In mature ecosystems, where capable actors tend to work in silos, the priority shifts to connecting existing structures rather than building new ones. Other factors include: the cohesiveness of the current system and any barriers to collaboration between key actors; decision-makers' openness to change; the trust the platform's backing organisation(s) can command; and the resources available to support the platform and innovation more broadly.
Internal Capacity
Organisations should honestly assess their human, financial, and operational resources, including their ability to mobilise and deploy additional support over time. Leadership commitment, organisational readiness, and internal ownership are equally important to ensure initiatives move beyond pilots and short-term activities.
Future Readiness
Given the rapidly evolving sector landscape, organisations are encouraged to apply foresight-informed thinking during the planning phase—building coordination approaches that are adaptable to shifting contexts and plausible future scenarios.
The “Constants”:
These are considered the prerequisites for launching any platforms, which help build the momentum, accountability, institutional connections, and technical capacity needed to sustain a platform and generate lasting impact.
-
Any new initiative needs at least one dedicated leader and several owners, whether individuals or organisations. This is particularly true of any structure that seeks to create change and overcome resistance to anything new: inertia, doubt and uncertainty. Leadership and ownership provide more than guidance and strategic direction: they generate the initial momentum to get a platform off the ground, hold stakeholders accountable, and help align different actors on shared priorities.
-
A social innovation platform in the humanitarian space, no matter how large, cannot achieve impact unless the solutions it supports find a way to enter mainstream programming or otherwise end their reliance on dedicated innovation funding. To achieve scaling and long-term sustainability, decision-makers operating in the resource allocation side of the ecosystem (donors, government, humanitarian implementers) must easily and regularly connect to the work of the platform and experience a sense of ownership in its operations. There should exist pathways to translate coordination outcomes to concrete operational changes.
-
Any innovation platform must apply current best practices in innovation methodology and be supported by adequately trained staff with access to up-to-date, relevant, and effective tools, guidance and frameworks. The expertise required lies not only in thematic knowledge, but also in process facilitation. The competence and resources gaps can be filled through partnerships, providing that the collaborative relationships are well structured and sustainable to create shared responsibility to manage the platform.
The “Variables”:
Choosing the right coordination model requires more than strategic ambition: it demands an honest assessment of what the context can support and what the organisation is realistically able to sustain. These criteria are intended to help organisations reflect on the design of their platform across four key dimensions: how formally it is governed, who it includes and how, the scale at which it seeks to operate, and the resources it requires to function as intended.
-
Definition: The degree to which an initiative is governed by shared rules, defined membership roles, and strategic planning.
● Low-level structure initiatives operate informally and reactively, requiring minimal resources and allowing for greater agility.
● High-level structure initiatives typically employ permanent staff, rely on predictable funding, and maintain institutional partnerships. They are less agile but better positioned to deliver sustained, long-term impact.
● Mid-level structure initiatives have documented ways of working — such as a Terms of Reference — but not necessarily binding partnership agreements. They balance flexibility with strategic ambition, and might evolve towards greater formality, or the opposite under resource constraints.
-
Definition: The degree to which a platform is designed to include different types of stakeholders in both decision-making and participation.
● Highly selective platforms focus engagement on a small group of core organisations that drive the agenda according to their own priorities, limiting non-members to passive roles. They can deliver focused results within a specific part of the ecosystem, but at the cost of broader systemic change.
● Highly inclusive platforms open decision-making to a wide range of stakeholders, developing agendas around widely shared priorities. They may grow to play a central role in the broader ecosystem but can struggle to align on priorities and face challenges in executing complex tasks.
● Moderately selective platforms curate membership to ensure diversity while maintaining a limited core group of stakeholders. They may alternate between internal and external-facing activities depending on the level of engagement sought.
-
Definition: The scale and scope at which a platform seeks to deliver results, independent of the quality or depth of those results.
● Broadly ambitious platforms seek to impact the entire ecosystem, often sector-agnostic or around broadly shared priorities such as climate change or rural development. Their strategy might include temporary areas of focus, but in the long run they seek to address emerging demands from the ecosystems they serve. While they can generate broad engagement and drive cross-sectoral innovation, they require significant capacity to address both systemic and specific challenges.
● Narrowly ambitious platforms limit their scope to one or a few sectors, specific challenges, or sub-national geographies. This focus enables depth in and sustained attention to specific areas, but risks missing contributions from outside their selected field.
● Reactively ambitious platforms concentrate on a few key challenge areas most relevant to the context, without aiming to engage the full response ecosystem. This can be a productive short-term focus, but risks falling into a "no man's land" where engagement is neither deep nor broad enough to drive meaningful change.
-
Definition: The human, financial, and all other resources required to operate the platform as designed.
● Low-investment platforms rely on part-time or volunteer staffing, donated spaces, and minimal shared tools. Their impact potential is limited, but they are resilient to funding shocks, perceived as neutral actors within the ecosystem, and well-positioned to scale if funding becomes available.
● High-investment platforms operate as full innovation hubs with specialised staff, recurrent incubation and acceleration programs, and a comprehensive suite of ecosystem services. Their funding requirements make them vulnerable to funding shifts and may place them in competition with other ecosystem actors. However, such platforms are better positioned to deliver complex projects and lasting impact at the ecosystem level.
● Mid-cost platforms have at least one dedicated staff member (or the equivalent capacity in part-time roles) and a working budget that supports events, research, and basic tools. They can manage light incubation or seed funding programs, but are generally not equipped for full Innovation Challenge Calls or scale-up support. More sustainable than high-cost models, they require time and strong partnerships to achieve impact.
-
Another dimension emerged during discussions with DRA Innovation Focal Points as RIL introduced the Guide: proactivity, contrasted with reactivity.
This dimension considers whether a platform is designed around a longer-term view of the ecosystem or primarily responds to immediate needs. Proactive coordination platforms are designed to anticipate recurring challenges, strengthen systems and capacities, and build resilience before the next disruption occurs.
By contrast, reactive coordination platforms operate more like a “task force”, mobilising stakeholders, resources, and support around the most urgent challenges at a given moment.
Putting It into Practice
Establishing an innovation coordination platform is not a one-size-fits-all endeavour. The right model depends on a solid understanding of the operating environment, the nature of the coordination gap, and the internal capacity and resources available to sustain the structure over time. Ecosystem-level conversations with key stakeholders are recommended to build a shared vision and surface coordination gaps, alongside foresight-informed thinking to anticipate how needs and conditions may evolve.
Different coordination modalities can also be combined, with different models applied at different layers of the ecosystem. For example, a platform may combine a relatively highly selective and structured governance architecture with dedicated, reactive task forces that operate with greater flexibility and less formal coordination arrangements. Such a layered approach may provide a way to balance system-wide coherence with contextual flexibility, allowing more agile and targeted support to emerge in response to changing needs and scenarios.
The archetypes and considerations outlined in this guide are intended not as a blueprint, but as a starting point: one that organisations should adapt, iterate on, and build from as they deepen their understanding of what their ecosystems need and what they are able to sustain to generate lasting impact.
Case Study 1: RIL’s Country Labs
A RIL Country Lab is a field-based, inter-agency innovation platform embedded within a specific humanitarian response context. Launched and hosted by RIL's Core Partners, Country Labs implement the full RIL model by bringing together NGOs, UN agencies, governments, local civil society, and non-traditional actors such as startups and social enterprises. Rather than implementing innovations directly, they create the conditions for diverse actors to identify shared challenges and co-develop solutions that address the needs of crisis-affected communities—through the four pillars of RIL’s services—with the goal of building dynamic, locally rooted innovation ecosystems that can test, adapt, and scale solutions from within the response itself.
Case Study 2: #Thoughtcast in Jordan
RIL launched its Thoughtcast series in collaboration with a local NGO partner (Majlisna), led by two team members from RIL. Through social media outreach, RIL brought together an initial community and established a WhatsApp group to support ongoing communication. The series has since convened both existing and new participants for sessions on topics such as “youth perspective on humanitarian innovation”, “local approaches to cost-effective change”, “duplication of efforts in the innovation space”, etc.
Case Study 3: Smart Communities Coalition
The Smart Communities Coalition (SCC) is a cross-sector initiative co-founded by Mastercard and USAID to bridge the gap between humanitarian organisations and the private sector — from startups to large corporations — in improving service delivery for refugee and displaced communities. Active in Uganda and Kenya, SCC mobilises collaboration through networking and matchmaking, financing, and the co-creation of new models to enhance livelihoods in refugee settings.