Innovation Fund Selection Process Prioritizes People
How does UNHCR address the challenge of choosing which early-stage ideas have the potential to become great solutions? It all begins with people eager to develop them.
By Amy Lynn Smith, Independent Writer + Strategist
The New York Times once ran an unsigned editorial calling for a man to be dragged through the mud “with a hemp rope” for having the audacity to invent something new. They accused him of bringing on “the destruction of human society.”
That man was Thomas Edison, who had just invented the phonograph. He was similarly ridiculed when he gave society the electric light bulb.
If Edison had been applying for a grant from the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Innovation Fund, he would have had a remarkably different experience. Because rather than presuming his inventions were so outlandish they couldn’t possibly work, the Innovation Fund selection process would have looked first at the person — Edison himself — his deep understanding of a problem he wanted to solve and his willingness to work as part of a team to continually refine and improve his ideas for the best possible outcome.
Part of UNHCR’s Innovation Service, the Innovation Fund is designed to support staff that are testing bright new ideas that can improve UNHCR’s operations worldwide. In many cases, there’s very little concrete evidence, in the beginning, to prove these ideas will actually work, beyond the concept for a better way of doing things.
“Selecting early-stage projects brings some unique challenges,” says Dina Zyadeh, Associate Innovation Officer (Operations), who leads the Innovation Fund. “How do you assess whether a team or project is worth investing in when you don’t have a lot of information to go on? And what are the factors that point to the likelihood of a successful team and innovation?”
After all, the ideas presented for support from the Innovation Fund aren’t tested or even fully formed, she explains. There’s no proof of concept or metrics to consider, so the Innovation Fund had to get inventive about developing a selection process that looks for other ways to evaluate the merit of the proposals they receive, while mitigating bias. It’s an ever-evolving process, but the current iteration is heavily focused on the people and teams that submit proposals rather than the ideas themselves.
Every good idea starts with people
Of course, the projects must align with the Innovation Fund’s strategic objectives to encourage innovations that can lead to improved decision-making in UNHCR. The Fund currently supports staff-developed novel solutions in four identified areas of work, from modeling and simulation to storytelling. But because nearly every project submitted is in its early stages, making it tricky to know how well it might ultimately work, the Innovation Fund has started looking more closely at the teams that submit the proposals.
There are two significant reasons why people are given greater focus than the ideas themselves in the selection process. One is that ideas tend to change, especially in the early stages, as the team learns by testing the initial idea. In addition, the Fund is less focused on hyper-novel ideas, and more on building the innovation capabilities of the teams involved. That’s why finding open-minded teams is important. Identifying teams that are willing to collaborate and learn quickly is essential to bringing any idea to fruition.
After initial proposals are submitted and evaluated for eligibility and strategic alignment, the Innovation Service creates a shortlist of teams with the greatest potential and schedules a meeting with each one. The goal is to learn more about each team and help them further refine and develop their proposals.
“First, we want to know how long the team has worked together and in what way they’re uniquely positioned to tackle the problem they’ve identified,” Zyadeh explains. “Then we look at the problem their proposal is intended to solve, how well they understand the problem, and whether there’s been an evolution in their understanding of the problem.”
It’s not just about whether a team can improve on their idea, but also how well they are able to work together to refine their proposals, given that innovation-oriented projects are, by nature, collaborative and constantly changing. Especially for ideas in their early stages, there are going to be many iterations, and a great deal of trial and error.
“We need to evaluate their ability to execute and learn quickly,” Zyadeh says. “Are they resilient enough to be able to change course as their project evolves? Because every project brought to us at this stage is going to need refining and further development to become a full-fledged initiative.”
A selection process that follows the same guidelines it gives applicants
As the Innovation Fund has evolved, so has the selection process — much the same as what’s expected of the projects being considered. Many of the ideas for the selection process have come from trial and error, the UNHCR Fellowship Program, and research and other data about how organizations can best support innovation. Zyadeh expects to continue refining the process over time.
Because of the early-stage nature of the proposals, it just doesn’t make sense to talk extensively about feasibility, including budgets and timelines — which was once a significant part of the selection process — because the uncertainty around a project’s impact and feasibility can only decrease as more information becomes available throughout the testing process.
Additionally, when the Fund analyzed the feasibility scores of previous applications, it became clear that these are areas people struggled with the most, because putting together a timeline and budget to test a new idea isn’t something applicants had experience with. As a result, there was no real value in weighing those aspects heavily. Instead, the priority has become understanding who the team is, how well they understand the problem they want to solve, and how they’re uniquely positioned to solve this problem.
After having worked with the Innovation Service on improving their proposals, the shortlisted applicants return for the last step of the selection process: a team interview, at which point the final decision is made about which teams to fund. That’s where timelines and budgets are mandatory — and even then, the Fund works with the teams to constantly fine-tune and update them throughout their work on the selected projects.
Continuous refinement is essential to innovation and the selection process itself
Although she admits the selection process will be a work in progress for the foreseeable future, one thing is certain: “We’ll always have to gauge people’s capability to be open to collaboration and change,” Zyadeh says. “At the end of the day, it all comes down to people.”
According to Zyadeh, improving the Fund’s capacity to evaluate candidates’ ability to execute and learn quickly is another area where improvement is needed. “Are they resilient enough to change course as their project evolves? Because every project presented to us in the early stage should be malleable as teams build their knowledge and work with their users,” she says.
Another shortcoming of the selection process the Fund identified and is keen to address is invisible barriers to innovation, which is a tenacious and complex problem. Although the Fund strives to have a robust selection process in place, the team believes there are invisible barriers and beliefs that prevent people from applying to the Fund.
“Some people have the potential to be great innovators,” Zyadeh says, “but don’t see themselves as capable and never apply. A narrow understanding of who can be an innovator also leads some managers to prevent their teams from applying.”
It’s understandable that people might not always see themselves, or the people they supervise, as inventive — especially if they’ve never embarked on an innovation project before. Not to mention the fact that some ideas won’t come to fruition, at least not in the way the people who submitted them first imagined.
Remember: Not every idea Thomas Edison had was a winner. But he was the kind of person who was willing to keep trying and refining ideas until he succeeded with those that changed the world for the better.
In that same vein, UNHCR’s Innovation Fund wants to continue improving its selection process. The Fund invites organizations that are testing various selection processes for projects to share their learnings and best practices. Please contact Dina Zyadeh at innovation@unhcr.org.
This article is one in a series highlighting the people and projects supported by the UNHCR Innovation Fund.
