Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Weeks
HNPW 2025 (17 - 28 March 2025)
          


 
Session title: Assessing Humanitarian Innovation: New vs. Better
Organizer(s): Innovation Norway, ELRHA, Grand Challenges Canda, HIP
25 Mar 25 09:00-10:30   (Salle 9)
 
SessionAbstract

Innovation projects deliver impact differently than conventional programming in the humanitarian space; Innovating typically involves backtracking, pivoting and constant iteration. Furthermore, the lion’s share of the impact sought through innovation efforts will manifest after the pilot project itself, as new solutions hopefully scale and go from experiment to business-as-usual. This spurs a range of questions withregard to Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL); How do we measure the improvement new solutions deliver compared to existing ones?When are innovations mature enough that the impact can be measured?What data can support the measuring of innovation outcomes?

This session will address:

  • Better solutions: How to compare innovations against existing solutionsin order to betterdetermine the value of an innovation

  • What are we measuring:Identifyingwhat weactually wantto measure andhow we understand key termslikeinnovation,scaleandadoption

  • Data:Whether wecanmake better use of the contextual data we alreadyhavein intelligent waysto measure results,in order toavoid inefficiencies in asking foradditionaldata

  • Timing:When to measure theemerging impactsof an innovation project


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