What do we know and what have we learned about scaling humanitarian education innovations?
HEA scaling mentor, Ian Gray of Gray Dot Catalyst, walks us through some key learnings and observations coming out of the HEA, on scaling humanitarian education innovations.
What do we know about scaling?
The HEA embarked on the process of supporting scale based on a framework that was outlined by Dan McClure and I in 2014, which identified a gap in the theory and practice on how scaling happens in the humanitarian sector. Based on our experience and research with 30+ organisations, we developed a model to address the ‘missing middle’ of innovation — scaling.
In this model we identify that the early stages of developing an innovation (stage 1 above) can be classed as ‘invention’, where problems and opportunities are recognised, and ideas to address these are then developed, prototyped and piloted. At the other end of the process, sits ‘optimization’, where incremental changes are made to known solutions (stage 4 in the diagram above). In between these two stages is ‘scaling’.
The first stage of scaling is ‘scale-up’, which is about adding in complexity that is often missed out when piloting a new invention. The aim of this stage is to create a sustainable solution, which includes an identified business model, adds in missing components and features, and connects with the supply chain and ecosystem, in a sustainable way. This most commonly happens within an organisation or within a single context/country.
The second stage is ‘scale-out’, which is the main focus of the majority of scaling literature, and is often heavily based upon the ‘diffusion curve’ idea. This stage of scaling is about distilling complexity in order to improve the ease of adoption of the innovation. The end point is to ensure that there is an easily replicable solution that can be taken on by new users and implemented across numerous organisations and in different contexts.
What have we learned through the HEA?
As with every model, we found that there are practices by the innovation teams in the HEA that challenge the model, and practices that confirm the model. The first challenge we were aware of from the start. Things are never as ‘linear’ as our theoretical models describe. This is why Dan McClure and I developed the Scaling Assessment Map, to help assess where each innovation is on their scaling journey and see what steps are right for them based on their innovation, organisation and implementing contexts. The main non-linearity challenge the HEA threw up was: the Perpetual Pilot.
At the point where our model identified the sustainability aspect of scaling up happening, particularly the final stages of codifying the innovation, a number of the teams in HEA have been carrying out significant scaling out activities, without completing the activities linked to the sustainability piece. This is because the opportunity to implement and have the innovation funded is highly reliant on the demand for, and financing of, the innovation. This demand and financing is directly correlated to emergencies occurring. Therefore, the length of time in each implementing location is less than it usually takes to complete the ‘scale-up’ process, and the funding often won’t cover the activities needed for scaling up. Meanwhile, new funding for implementation of the education innovation comes from new emergencies in a different country/context. So, a state of ‘perpetual pilot’ sets in. By this we mean, the innovator or innovation team are directly involved in working with partners or in their own organisations to implement their ‘pilot’ innovation in new contexts, where there is a new emergency and/or funding opportunity, which gives the impression that they are starting to ‘scale-out.’ However, this ‘scaling out’ is highly intensive and isn’t truly scalable because the foundations of sustainability that should be created in the scale-up phase are missing.
Beyond the above learnings, when scaling education in emergencies (EiE) we also need to consider the following:
- Regulation (and the crucial role of governments)
Of the humanitarian sectors, education is one of the most highly regulated. Therefore, moving from piloting to scaling an education innovation cannot happen in most countries without sign-off from the Ministry of Education (MoE). Education is a politically sensitive issue — shaping the minds of children and youth, making it a social, political, religious and cultural cornerstone of ‘nation building’. This means that content, format and delivery of education is potentially contentious at multiple levels. These issues are present without even factoring in the legal status of IDPs, refugees and stateless communities in a given context, and the ramifications of status regarding access to education for these children and adolescents. This means that in order to scale, implementers must make substantial time commitments and expend significant energy on navigating the regulatory and stakeholder management demands of engaging with MoEs.
However, the ‘flip side’ of this regulation is that receptive governments have the capacity and capability to provide a ready made scaling mechanism for education innovations, through their MoE. It may be challenging to get a foothold, but if the MoE is sufficiently invested in and supportive of your intervention, it provides a clear channel for scaling. Whether the Ministry is willing or able to fund such scaling from within its own budget is another matter. If they do have the funds available, then implementers must be adept at ‘business to government’ selling and contracting. This is something that can be difficult for numerous reasons, not least the level of decentralisation of the budgetary process, the size of MoE budgets, procurement processes, local level requirements etc.
Government regulation and provision of education is therefore a double-edged sword for those seeking to innovate — a boon in some environments, but also a process that demands painstaking stakeholder mapping, continuous relationship building and navigating long registration and decision making processes. The time and financial investment this takes needs to be factored into implementers’ planning. Scaling out the innovation to new countries is clearly more difficult in this way than scaling up within a country context. However, even negotiating scale-up within a country can also take a lot of time and effort, particularly in a decentralised governance system.
2. Business Models
For any innovation to scale, it requires a sustainable business model. Understanding what the business model opportunities are for humanitarian education innovations requires a deep understanding of how the regulatory and funding landscape (or ‘market’) works. As we outlined above, education is a highly regulated sector and a public good. Therefore the government plays the role of regulator and provider in most countries, meaning that there is limited scope for developing a sustainable business model for an education innovation, other than it being adopted/financially supported by governments (either directly by the MoE, or as part of a package of funding to the MoE, via a donor). However, there are still a few business model options that are helpful to think through.
These can be categorised as:
- Targeting based on the State as a ‘Customer’
- New markets for the core innovation
- Leveraging capabilities
- Lean business and operating models
- The question of Intellectual Property
a) The State as a ‘Customer’
While NGOs operating in the humanitarian space are guided by humanitarian principles, they must necessarily make decisions to respond to emergencies in countries where they are non-operational, based upon a myriad of factors other than humanitarian need. The question that most NGOs will face when it comes to scaling, is the degree that they will put revenue or funding over humanitarian need (this choice is not always binary or mutually exclusive).
From a sustainable business model perspective, organisations need to target those countries where the MoE would have the budget, capacity and interest in taking on, or at least paying for the implementation of the innovation. However, explicitly stating this can cause problems internally and externally for organisations in terms of aligning these decisions with their humanitarian principles.
The potential role of the state as regulator, service provider and potential ‘customer’ needs to be assessed when identifying countries to ‘scale-out’ to. For successful scale, an analysis of the potential of a state to be a customer for the innovation (ie. support the innovation financially or systemically) should be done. The weighting given to this part of their assessment will vary from organisation to organisation.
b) New Markets for the Core Innovation
When contemplating whether innovations could potentially target new markets (whether in a development or humanitarian setting), four key questions should be asked:
- Are we willing to serve another market, or is this seen as ‘off mandate?’
- Is there a viable product/service that could work in another market?
- How would we serve that market?
- Would the serving of this market create enough surplus to cross-subsidise our provision of the innovation for humanitarian purposes?
c) Leveraging Capabilities
A number of the teams within the HEA have generated intellectual property and capabilities that are not the core innovation, but support the implementation of that core innovation. A review of these capabilities can lead to the development of new revenue streams, through providing these capabilities as a separate product or service. These capabilities can be things such as ‘know-how’ that can be used for consultancy, software platforms that can have multiple uses, training services etc. In thinking through this approach, teams need to go through the four questions above, as well as an additional question: Will the development of this ancillary service/product take away critical resources from the delivery of the core innovation?’ With limited resources at their disposal, this is a critical question.
d) Lean Business and Operating Models
The likely revenue for any humanitarian education innovation will be low, with little, if any, surplus. Therefore, from the outset, when thinking through scaling up and scaling out, organisations should be thinking through what their ‘leanest’ business and operating models could be. There are trade-offs to be made regarding the potential quality control and support for products and services when thinking through what is implemented by the innovating agency, and what is outsourced to lower cost entities, such as volunteer networks. This path needs to be trodden carefully. Curating communities of practice and other methodologies for running ‘lean’ central operations still cost money and require some degree of management, as well as coming with inherent trade-off issues, such as quality control.
e) Intellectual Property
Finally, when it comes to sustainable business models, there is the issue of intellectual property (IP). Many donors require that any development of IP through work on innovations they fund, particularly software and codified systems and processes, be made freely available through some form of creative commons licensing. There is some merit to this approach in terms of potential dissemination of the innovation, and the use of the donors funds to produce public goods. However, although the sentiments behind this approach are completely reasonable and altruistic, they can be problematic for developing a sustainable business model. There are plenty of examples of successful business models based upon creative commons licensing, but they do not work in all cases. In some cases, by making creative commons licensing a requirement, donors are setting innovation teams the challenge to develop sustainable business models with ‘one hand tied behind their back.’ Allowing the innovation teams the latitude to protect their IP if that is the best option for them to create a sustainable business model will increase the likelihood of their pilot innovations successfully scaling. There are other mechanisms other than the open sourcing of IP that can ensure that the innovation is available for free to crisis-affected children.
3. Partnerships
All of the HEA grantees were involved in some form of partnership, as they developed their innovation and sought to scale it. Much of the focus of innovation theory and practice is concentrated on individuals and teams, with little literature on innovation partnerships and how they might be different than other types of partnerships. In the HEA we started to observe some specific factors that need to be considered for innovation partnerships. However, we also found that there was still a lot of foundational thinking and practice that could be adopted by the teams using established partnering methodologies and practice. Therefore, a significant amount of time was spent with a number of teams on working through their partnering methodology and management.
We found that the most common types of partnerships were:
Implementers: Working with other organisations that were implementing the innovation. Although this is a common methodology in humanitarian action, some of the difficulties of this approach, such as monitoring and evaluation (M&E), become exacerbated for innovation programmes due to the limited frameworks for M&E of innovations.
Government: Types and level of engagement with government varied amongst the teams, but for the ones who did engage to a significant level, there were clear advantages for scaling, as identified earlier.
Funders: The age old debate of where donors sit as partners on the transactional to transformational continuum again is exacerbated in many innovation funding envelopes.
The HEA is a good example of this, where it tried to go beyond a transactional approach, of just providing funds, to a more transformational approach, where it was directly providing support for M&E and Scaling. The HEA teams had different ways of leveraging and using this support, but it was clear that for the HEA to be a good partner, it needed to adapt its support to each team based on their needs, rather than provide the same type and level of support to all of the teams.
Creative: A few of the innovation teams in the HEA had creative partners when they were developing their innovations. As they moved from the initial design and piloting of their innovations towards scaling them, the need for the creative capabilities of these partners was not the same as it once was. This is something that is a particular feature of innovations, and in some ways goes against more mainstream thinking on partnerships, in that the partnership is either a short term one and/or the nature of it changes, from being a transformational partnership, to a more transactional partnership. This is something that is counterintuitive for most partnership thinking, as the process is often portrayed as moving from transactional to transformational. There were a couple of teams in the HEA programme that had to deal with this ‘reverse’ journey.
Layer Player: The term layer player comes from the ‘Business Model Navigator’ methodology and denotes an organisation that is playing a particular role in a ‘value chain.’ During the HEA programme, we identified that one or two teams were playing this role. They were adding in new innovations into the existing ‘value chain’ of education, i.e. they were creating a new role/process that hadn’t traditionally been in the value chain.
So they are now selling/providing a new innovation to an international NGO or local NGO — i.e. targeting a specific layer of the value chain to deliver the innovation. This means that they need to be able to master how to be a Humanitarian to Humanitarian service provider — something that is being increasingly recognised as a significant aspect of humanitarian action, with the development of the H2H network.
Another key factor for partnerships in humanitarian education is that many partnerships rely on individual relationships between people in the partner organisations. If the partnership isn’t embedded in the institutions, then it can unravel when one of the individuals moves on from their role or organisation. Something that is particularly common within humanitarian settings.
During a partnership workshop with one of the teams and their partners in the MENA region, we carried out an exercise where each of the participants mapped out their experience of partnerships across the TPI partnering cycle. What was significant was that the number of partnerships that had lasted through to scale was small, and that the participants’ experiences at the scale stage were entirely ambivalent or negative. Although there are multiple reasons for this, what is clear is that more work needs to be done to support partnerships to scale.
This also corresponds with a learning that has emerged from the HEA regarding the fact that all of the partners may not be able to scale at the same rate. This is particularly pertinent where one or more of the partners is a small organisation or start up, whose agility and flexibility may have been very valuable in the early stages of the innovation journey, but whose inability to deliver at scale is a significant hindrance at the latter stages of the same journey.
Finally, just as the knowledge base for the M&E of humanitarian education innovations is limited, so are the M&E practices for innovation partnerships. In the HEA process, we carried out a partnership review with two partners, and this exercise proved fruitful for both of them. However, developing process and outcome metrics for partnerships is something that most partners don’t do — which means that the value of partnerships is not well understood. This is an area that innovation partnerships can take a lead in, if the support and finances are made available.
So, where are we now?
Over the last three years, HEA has helped develop our understanding of scaling humanitarian education innovations. There have been education specific insights that provide us with a deeper understanding of what it takes to scale humanitarian education innovations, such as the role of MoEs and the business model factors to consider. There has also been the broader understanding of how humanitarian innovations can get stuck in ‘perpetual pilot’ due to the idiosyncrasies of humanitarian action and funding. We have developed some solutions to help with this, but there is still much to do to address some of the issues raised here. Building on the learnings of the HEA in future investment in innovation for humanitarian education is needed; but we would also recommend that addressing those unresolved issues we have identified needs to be part of any humanitarian education innovation’s work plan.
The above learnings will be built upon in the HEA meta evaluation report, policy briefs, research papers and tools, due to be released on the HEA Learning Series over the coming months. Please follow us, comment and share, to join the conversation and be the first to know when we release new evidence and learnings.
