Creating a Space Where Everyone Can Innovate
In UNHCR’s Innovation Fellowship Programme, diversity and equality are highly valued and contribute to productive collaboration among participants.
By Amy Lynn Smith — Writer + Strategist
Innovation is for everyone. It’s not something reserved for a particular type of person, people of particular races or cultures, or people who work in specific areas such as technology. Anyone can imagine and develop a better way of doing things, and the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Innovation Service’s Innovation Fellowship Programme provides an inclusive environment where everyone can learn and brainstorm together. Participants are not selected for having existing expertise, but for bringing forth a creative mindset and interest in testing new approaches in the organization.
As is the case in nearly every business sector and endeavor, women are playing an increasingly significant role in the Innovation Fellowship Programme. In fact, two of the women who were part of the 2019 Innovation Fellowship Programme — Helena Ardura Garcia, a Technical Officer in the Prequalification Unit Department of In Vitro Diagnostics at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, and Monica Vazquez Rodriguez, a Senior Communicating with Communities Associate at UNHCR in Mexico — were voted as the most supportive and collaborative participants by the rest of their cohort.
Both originally from Mexico, they share a belief that’s becoming increasingly common in their home country, in response to the continued prevalence of patriarchy: Women must be engaged in lifting up their own voices and pursuing their career goals.
“There is a Mexican saying that if you don’t speak up, no one will hear you,” Ardura says. “You can’t just sit there quietly waiting for people to see you.”
Vazquez underscores the importance of people moving toward collaboration and uplifting non-traditional voices in the sector.
“The future should be forged by everyone because it is for everyone,” she says. “I’m a true believer that we all have something to say, and every time we hear one voice there is another one that isn’t being heard. So we need to listen to all the stories.”
Equal opportunity to participate
By design, UNHCR’s Innovation Fellowship Programme is a supportive initiative, where current participants work with each other and Fellowship alumni who serve as mentors, sharing ideas through workshops and ongoing communication. Fellows work on their projects with the goal of collaborating with colleagues back at their home offices to bring those projects to fruition or reshape them into something new — whatever is needed to achieve the solution to a problem a Fellow has come up with.
Ardura’s project is focused on improving the efficiency of assessment processes in areas such as HIV, malaria and, more recently, SARS-CoV-2 in vitro diagnostics. Her team assesses the quality, safety, and performance of the diagnostics to be used in WHO Member States, which is done through a technical and regulatory review, in alignment with international best practices and the use of international standards for manufacturing.
Much of this centers around communication with medical device manufacturers and team members, who are often too busy to pause and re-evaluate the way things are done. Ardura says it became clear through the Fellowship Programme that even incremental steps can lead to improvements if every member of the team is working together. She’s also learned that innovation doesn’t have to mean something completely new but can simply be an enhancement to an existing process.
For example, one step Ardura took was increasing the communication with manufacturers and involving more expert WHO colleagues before and during the review process, to make decisions along the way. The goal was to improve efficiency and save a valuable resource: time.
Vazquez’s project changed significantly from the original idea she brought to the Fellowship Programme. Rather than a technology initiative for field monitoring, she decided she wanted to improve the way UNHCR communicates with asylum seekers and refugees. She experimented with a few different ideas — including using theater as a means of communication — but ultimately arrived at the idea of asking established refugees to welcome new arrivals and help them get settled.
“Refugees expressed their need to hear from others who have experienced the same things they have, someone who could truly understand what they need, how they feel and what they’ve been through,” she explains. “Even more, they want their voices to be heard, as we all do.”
Both Vazquez and Ardura also learned that innovation can be isolating at times. Vazquez points out that innovation challenges the establishment, and behaviors that feel safe and comfortable — which may actually put women at an advantage.
“Because of the gender gap, on one hand I believe women are more used to being part of this struggle,” she says. “On the other hand, a woman innovating is like a full rupture. Most humans are not good with change, so it gets complicated.”
Ardura adds that because of the gender gap — even though it’s closing — women can feel a sense of internal friction, too.
“We limit ourselves as women sometimes,” she says. “Culturally, we aren’t really encouraged to take risks, to go against the current.”
Collaboration in action
Ardura and Vazquez both feel they made good progress in their projects, but some of the lessons they learned along the way about their own professional development may prove to be equally valuable in the long run.
Of course, they learned the key elements of the Innovation Fellowship Programme — invaluable skills such as teamwork and collaboration, iterating and experimenting with new ideas, exploring different approaches to their work, and developing projects intended to improve the assistance they provide to people of concern. These projects often continue well beyond the one-year Innovation Fellowship Programme.
But they also saw the importance of people coming from different backgrounds and experiences can work together to create real change, because that’s a fundamental principle of the Innovation Fellowship Programme. Everyone is learning concepts and approaches that are unfamiliar, so everyone is a beginner together — everyone is starting from the same place, no matter where they are in their career. That’s an unusual scenario in almost any workplace.
Vazquez adds that she received plenty of support from the other participants in the Fellowship Programme. Ardura agrees, even though she initially worried that the fact she isn’t part of UNHCR might be awkward. But it quickly became very clear that everyone in the Programme was treated equally. In fact, she says it created an opportunity for everyone to get to know each other outside of their operation on a more personal level — forming a support system created by the simple fact that they were all Fellows in the same cohort.
“The Fellowship is a safe space to experiment because it puts everyone on the same level: We are all Fellows with the same potential to innovate,” Ardura says. “I feel like the women in our cohort really excelled with our projects. That’s not to say the men did not, but what’s important is that no matter what our project was or where we were from around the world, we were all equal.”
Diversity as an asset
UNHCR is already committed to diversity and inclusion across the organization, but perhaps nowhere is it more celebrated than within the Innovation Fellowship Programme. There’s no question that emergency response work tends to have a higher ratio of men compared to other genders, but that’s evolving.
There are natural differences in points of view and life experiences that are simply a fact of life, such as those between people of various cultures, or different genders and sexual orientations. For Ardura, the Innovation Fellowship underscored the value of including everyone’s voices, because not everyone’s needs and experiences are going to be the same. In particular, she found it valuable that the Programme brought together people outside their daily work to learn from and with each other. “In a way,” she says, “it’s like a structured sharing of experiences.”
Ultimately, both Ardura and Vazquez appreciated the opportunity to move their concepts forward in collaboration with the other members of their Innovation Fellowship cohort — and their colleagues back at their offices.
