Our functions
From ideas to scale.
The Response Innovation Lab’s mission is to create an enabling environment for the innovations to thrive in meeting the needs of vulnerable populations. Our work aims to remove the barriers to delivery of aid within communities, camps, households, and to individuals.
Our labs serve all organizations involved in supporting a humanitarian crisis, including governments, NGOs, entrepreneurs, community based organizations (CBO’s) and academics, and the needs of the most vulnerable people.
Through problem and solution analysis, the labs support localized innovations in their context through investment to pilot, scale and ultimately bringing solutions to market. By doing this, RIL helps to develop an effective, dynamic ecosystem that maximizes the innovation potential within each response and achieves better outcomes for crisis affected communities.
Our Functions
The Response Innovation Labs offer three functions that support identifying challenges in humanitarian settings, sourcing solutions, and supporting their development and roll-out. The labs utilize these functions within the framework of the local context, to support the humanitarian ecosystems achieving sustainable and long-lasting outcomes.
Somalia.
MAP AND Convene
RIL convenes actors from across the response context, from traditional humanitarian actors (UN, I/NGOs, government) to local civil society organizations, universities and research centers, social entrepreneurs, innovation hubs and private enterprises of all size. This is done locally using a human centred design as part of large-scale events and sector specific meetings. These convene events allow us to capture and map the actors, along with the cross-thematic challenges and innovations that exist within the ecosystem. These ecosystem maps are made public to actors within the response context.
broker and Matchmake
Our labs engage in brokering and matchmaking to connect problem-holders with solution-providers. As much as possible, we try to identify readily available solutions to quickly solve challenges, either from local sources or from other humanitarian contexts that can be then be adapted to the local context. We also offer an online MatchMaker platform that allows actors within the context to submit challenges online. Once a challenge has been submitted, RIL staff consult with our network of subject matter experts (SME’s) and research both internal and external innovation databases to produce a selection package of potential solutions to address the submitted challenge.
Support and scale
We support innovators and implementers to maximize their ability to deliver successful innovations. This includes connecting actors to external capacity-building resources and expertise to improve design and management skills, directly providing specialized tools and trainings to facilitate innovation in a humanitarian context. We also provide free access to RIL Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) tools for evaluating the impact of innovations, advice on ethics in humanitarian innovation and, when funding allows, provide seed funding to test prototypes or conduct pilots.
GENERATE AND SHARE EVIDENCE
Throughout all of our interventions, we take care to generate quality evidence as possible and to share it widely and in user-friendly ways. Our unique humanitarian innovation Evidence Toolkit helps solutions in pilot and scaling phase build a base of qualitative and quantitative evidence about the uptake of their innovation, the change that they are generating, the feedback they are receiving and the changes made to their innovation as a result of this information. We also track the composition of the ecosystem and the interactions between its actors to better understand where and how to invest new resources.