Supporting Scale: Lessons Learned from Humanitarian Innovators

A year ago, we put out a call for an Innovator Support Platform to provide tailored support to Seed and Transition to Scale innovators.  

Our evaluation, which included collaborating with innovators on the scoping and selection process, identified Gray Dot Catalyst (GDC) as the outstanding candidate: they have an impressive track record in advancing humanitarian innovation across the world through mentorship and technical support, they effectively engage with regional accelerators in the Middle East and Africa to support their context-specific work, and they comprise of a well-connected and experienced team equipped to support innovators navigating and growing in the humanitarian ecosystem.   

GDC will spearhead our new Innovation Support Platform, and along the way, they will capture and share key lessons learned in collaboration with the innovation teams as they navigate their journey to scale. In this first blog, GDC Communications Manager, Charlotte Jenner, sits down with colleagues Ian Gray, Stuart Davis and Lydia Tanner to discuss the different areas of support that they will provide and some of the lessons they have learned so far as mentors. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Supporting Scale: Lessons Learned from Humanitarian Innovators 

Gray Dot Catalyst has been supporting humanitarian innovators to scale for over 10 years, from helping Translators Without Borders to scale their model for providing life saving information, to running bootcamps with organisations like the KoboToolbox team. As a team, GDC is invested in building a collaborative environment that provides demand-driven support, tailored to innovators’ needs and aligned to their individual scaling journeys. In this conversation, the team shares what innovators can expect, and reflects on what they have learned along the way from the innovators they have worked with.  

Charlotte: Ian, as GDC’s Founder and Managing Director, can you explain a bit about GDC and the approach we take to innovator support? 

Ian: Simply put, GDC supports innovations to scale, from the very early stages right through the entirety of that journey. We work with funders and investors to run accelerator programmes for cohorts, where we provide a range of tailored support for innovators. The visual to the right illustrates the different areas that we cover as part of our platform. 

I think it’s really important to understand that the kind of Support Platform we provide is not just a bunch of so-called experts supporting innovation teams. The innovation teams we’ve worked with have been key to our learning; they have helped us build our expertise and they inform the design of our support. Over the last 10 years, we’ve supported over 200 organizations, and so we know that for innovators working in the humanitarian sector, things can look a bit different in comparison to other sectors. For example, the end-user group doesn’t pay for the innovation and in the case of the CHIC cohort, this has significant implications for their business models and their ability to raise funds. The innovations are also designed for conflict-affected contexts, which brings its own set of complexities. 

At GDC we have a small core team who have robust experience supporting humanitarian innovations and who are deeply familiar with challenges and complexities of the landscape. We also bring in Associates who have strong experience in different technical fields – from finance to monitoring, evaluation and learning, behavioural science, partnerships and CHICs targeted sectors of energy, health, life-saving information and WASH. Through this model, innovators access support from professionals with 10 to 20+ years of experience in their technical areas and a deep understanding of scaling in humanitarian contexts. 

Listening to and learning from innovators, understanding their needs and providing the right support, is central to what we do. What are some common areas that you’ve learned innovators need support with? 

Ian: We’ve built our support model around six common areas where innovators tend to need the most help: financial support, strategic mentoring, training and tools, brokering partnerships, technical support and peer support. Most people equate support with money. While GDC doesn’t provide funding for this support platform—the innovators receive that and other support from Grand Challenges Canada under CHIC— there is a lot of support around financial elements of scaling that we do provide. For example, we connect teams with other funders and investors where we can, support them in developing their evidence base and building agile strategies, as well as working on revenue models and developing new revenue streams. I’ll pass to Stuart, our Senior Associate advising on Finance, to tell us a bit more.  

Stuart: Thanks Ian. There are three main areas where innovators tend to need support related to financing their innovation. Those are developing a sustainable business model, finding the right donors, and ensuring financial sustainability. 

Building a strong business model is a key step to any innovation being able to source funding in the first place. Supporting innovators to work on that business model is one of the key things that needs to happen, including building in some flex in the model as the innovation grows and ensuring the innovation’s financial planning aligns with those different stages of growth.  

Also, identifying and communicating effectively with donors is key.  Different donors have varying priorities on what they’re going to fund, and telling a compelling story about an innovation and why it should be funded, and then getting that message across to the right people, is critical. Again, the business model is a key element of an innovator’s story, but there is also an important communications strategy piece to that work, which you Charlotte, as our communications specialist, support the innovators with.  

Finally, for a lot of innovators in the humanitarian space, money is not their overriding motivation.  Still, their innovation needs to be sustainable, it needs to be able to fund itself to keep growing and scaling. Funding is volatile and it can be very short-term. So keeping on top of that, understanding finances, and making sure the organization itself has the right level of reserves so it can ride those bumps in funding as things grow, is crucial.  

Ian: Strategic mentoring is another big piece of the puzzle. It means having someone on hand who can see the entire scaling journey and understand what the teams need. Someone who can advise them on their gaps, identify where they might need to focus their efforts, and then determine when to bring in specific technical experts (our Associates), to address specific needs. 

The support we provide is also backed up by training and tools, many of which we’ve developed ourselves based on our previous work with innovators. This element of our support is about building innovators’ capacity to navigate the scaling journey in the short, medium and long term–and ultimately, to do so independently.  

What sort of challenges might innovators find themselves facing along their scaling journey, and how does the GDC support address some of those? 

Ian: Scaling innovations, whether within large organizations or as independent start-ups, comes with unique organizational growing pains. Organizational development is equally as important as the ongoing development of the innovation itself. We provide innovators with support to think through what organizational development should look like for them as they grow from a one person team to a 50, 100, 1,000 strong organization scaling their innovation across the world. 

Just like it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a value network to scale an innovation. Developing an innovation requires collaboration between not only partners but a whole, wider system of actors. Identifying and making connections with potential partners can sometimes be a challenge for innovators. That is where our partnership brokering support comes in. We have a vast network of connections across the humanitarian sector and beyond, which we can use to broker those partnerships. 

Humanitarian innovators often struggle with getting the right type of evidence for the right audiences. That is a challenge that is experienced across the humanitarian sector, beyond innovation, but there are specific challenges that impact innovators here. Lydia, our Senior Associate advising on Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL), can speak a bit more to that. 

Lydia: Thanks Ian. We often see a two-fold challenge related to MERL.  

First, innovators are typically pressed for time, often working with small teams wearing multiple hats. So among early stage innovators, MERL tends to be an add-on task that the founder or the person who is running the innovation squeezes into an already full workload.  

Second, innovators are often ambitious, capable people who set lofty goals for the rigor and completeness of their evidence. They can aim for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or experimental impact studies, believing they will demonstrate the value of their work. These methods have a place at the right point in the innovation cycle. But, if they happen too early in the innovation cycle, they often don’t provide the intended insights because the conditions aren’t in place. For example, the innovation isn’t being implemented consistently enough yet to justify an RCT. These designs are also often time-consuming and expensive, exceeding available capacity and resources at early stages.  

We help teams address this by first thinking through who their immediate audiences are and the questions they are asking. Instead of focusing on what evidence might be needed in five years’ time, we encourage innovators to think about the immediate needs of different audiences and to build an evidence system that meets them. This includes recognizing that one of the most important audiences is their internal teams. Our approach helps teams to think through how they can facilitate evidence generation to inform internal knowledge and learning while staying realistic about their time and skills capacity.  

Connecting evidence and decision making is another key area where teams often need support. We encourage innovators to consider what the processes are that allow them to use evidence to inform their work and decision making, which can be as simple as clarifying what’s needed, and making sure that timelines align with key moments in the innovation cycle. A lot of the support is driving home the importance of shorter term learning, rather than relying solely on big evaluations that take a long time to deliver results. 

Thanks Lydia. What else has GDC learned from the teams we have worked with? 

Ian: When it comes to the Support Platform, a key lesson we’ve learned is to be as demand driven as possible; avoid formulaic and supply-driven approaches. Every innovation team is unique, and different teams need different types of support on different aspects of their innovation. They often need different levels of support as well–this requires flexibility. 

The majority of what we know is learned from innovators. A key learning has been that while no two innovations are exactly the same, there are commonalities, and innovation teams supporting each other is a significant part of our design. We facilitate peer to peer learning and support between teams and make sure that teams are able to interact and learn from each other. That learning relationship is really powerful. 

If you would like to hear more about the Innovator Support Platform, the latest cohort of innovators or the GDC team, you can contact GDC Senior Programme Manager, Bhavya Srinivasan on [email protected].