 We quickly move on to the second part, and that's group panel discussion with five very interesting persons for this. The question that is posed is, if you have one million euros, how would you use them to foster a culture of innovation within MSF? So, what we will do here is that we will ask the question to each panel member and they have two top three minutes to answer, and then afterwards we will open up for a group discussion and you're welcome to join. And I think that this question is very interesting. It takes something very concrete, measurable, one million euros, and then you have to transform it into something less tangible, but just as real and important. And that's a culture of innovation that is something we need in order to be able to do what we do the best way possible. And I think that I will not speak so much about that anymore, but I will give the word to Tarun Sarval that is the head of ICRC Innovation Unit, right? Yes, thank you. Thank you. My name is Tarun Sarval. I work with the ICRC. Thank you for inviting me here. Only two minutes, so I'll just go straight into it. It's a hypothetical question, but in fact, about 18 months ago, this is exactly what happened is that somebody came from a private source and provided one million to say, why don't you start on a process of innovation? And so what I'm going to talk about is a little bit about my learnings, both of the things that have worked, but I think more lessons that I've learned, you know, in which I failed. So the first thing I would spend money on and quite a large chunk of money would be actually internal communication. There are so many ideas out there, but we've really got to take everyone on. And the thing with innovation is you realize very quickly that in a sense, if you talk about innovation, visions, et cetera, it's quite disempowering. It gets into areas of expertise. There are complications within the organization. And if you really want to reach somewhere, this is like the biggest challenge. It needs to be invested in. You need somebody else to do it than yourself. So that's number one. The second thing is it's not only about internal communication. And what I found was one of the most effective ways in which ICRC people started talking about this innovation is when we had 50% ICRC and 50% external people. These are people with expertise in the areas that the ICRC was interested in, companies, other development organizations, other humanitarian organizations. Because I think there is a fear of opening the gates. There is a fear for all of us to kind of go out. I know for ICRC and I can sort of see it here as well. So I think that's the second biggest thing. The third is what would we do with this money? We kind of made a pot and asked people for suggestions of what they wanted to do. And really very, very, very small sort of criteria. Does it help people? Is it scalable? Is it going to have impact? And why is it not being funded? And really very, very limited amounts of process to kind of get this started. Now, a lot of projects have started as a result of it. But one of the things that I've learned is that you have to properly resource the projects. So having the expertise outside and having the money for the HR is absolutely key. Otherwise these projects go on and on and they never finish. And that's a kind of a waste of money. So that's number three. The fourth is about needs. Where are these needs coming from? We've invested quite a lot of time and money on developing an online platform. It's called redinnovation.org. Please look it up. And it's about sourcing needs from the field. It's very difficult to start. It's very difficult to start because the culture is hierarchical. But it's on this basis that we start to fund kind of projects. I would suggest that you go and see the site and you will see what people's needs are in the field. And this gives a certain transparency to the innovation process. All right. You have a second chance later on. Thank you very much. Okay. So next one is not external. He's very internal. He's Cisco Villalonga, Deputy Operational Director at OCBA. That's MSF Spain. Okay. Thank you. Good afternoon. Regarding how to spend one million Euros in innovation, I will try to bring three basic ideas that I will explain. Protect the people, protect the money, and don't forget the priorities. And I will go for just a quick example. Very recent Ebola outbreak, where there was plenty of money available for innovation. There were challenges and unprecedented challenges for the organization to overcome. And we didn't have the answers for those challenges. And a lot of people willing to find solutions for those challenges. Going to the people, I would talk about cultural change. We need to invest time and resources and money for cultural change. We are an organization that is quite tolerant to failure. But individually speaking, this is not happening that much as an organization, yes, but not the individuals. Sometimes they are afraid to expose themselves to try and fail. So we should promote and encourage and recognize those people in the organization trying and eventually failing. And also related to this cultural change to promote and take advantage, because it's the way that innovation works, to promote fluid interactions and identifying the key people. Sometimes they can be decision makers, but many times they are just people eager to try and they become a kind of poll of attraction for innovation. Second one related to money, as I was saying, protect the money or block that budget for innovation and ensure proper management. And I would say strong project managers for the innovation initiatives and having these people in an accountability system, not related project by project, but globally speaking, they say, okay, there's a portfolio of innovation where there will be some projects that will move ahead, some others with agile decision making, they will be dropped at a certain moment and let's look to the global picture only. And finally, as I was saying, focus on strategic priorities with this risk of dispersion of opportunistic innovation to everywhere, as we cannot lose this opportunistic thing, but there has to be somebody always safeguarding that we invest in the core of our priorities, as it was, for instance, the example in Ebola. Thank you very much, Sisko. Very good. So now we move on to Josia Kaplan, and you work for the Humanitarian Innovation Project, right? So please give us your version. And thank you MSF for the generous offer of a million euros to an academic, which I won't comment on the wisdom of that. But let me first start off by saying very much as an outsider that I think MSF deserves recognition for the good work that its various innovation units across the system have already been doing in confronting a major challenge in instituting a culture of innovation. And that's at the heart of any emergency-oriented organization, how to address short-term innovation needs while simultaneously fostering an organization-wide cultural patience to see through longer-term innovation processes successfully. I thought what I could do today is just throw out two points that are often left out of these kind of discussions, and then maybe a few more point-specific ideas of how to actually spend that money. I think in general, across the humanitarian community, more can always be done to develop better recognition for the potential of beneficiary-led innovations. Existing approaches to humanitarian innovation too often tend to overlook the talents, skills, and aspirations of crisis-affected peoples themselves, whether in identifying piloting or scaling up new ideas and solutions to their own challenges. And this is supported by literature and user-centered design, indigenous innovation, and participatory methodology, some of which we've heard of today. The way to actually implement that at the project level, there's really interesting work on innovation spaces that perhaps we can discuss more. But as an ethos, I think it's essential to any culture of innovation to recognize what already exists in the communities you're working with. Second, key to innovation echoing Tern's essential point is the idea of cross-fertilization of ideas. One specific way to facilitate this kind of cross-fertilization in the innovation culture, one I'm extremely biased about, of course, is the building of more robust partnerships with academic research communities. One idea that I know is tremendous interest at my university and many others is funding fellowships to second MSF staff in relevant centers of academic excellence to expose them to some of the wider discourses around innovation theory and cultural change that we work with on a daily basis. Lastly, just to throw out a quick scattering of more point-specific general practices, catalyst funds, a pool of money that internal innovation teams can use for rapid proof of concept of new ideas is always welcome, but it has to be combined or should be combined with a degree of competition through MSFY competitions and judgment panels, which tends to provide an intrinsic motivation and structure. I'd also invest in the development and collection of innovation metrics and indicators built into operating reviews, which requires ownership through committed innovation champions to help make sure that the needle is moving on those innovation metrics. Lastly, and finally, for a relatively small cost, every effort possible, and I apologize if this is already ongoing, should be done to workshop and develop clear and relevant ethical guidance for managing humanitarian innovation in a manner and approach consistent with MSF's core values to provide guide rails for the more sensitive issues around innovations that can cause friction, some of which we've also heard of today. And I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you very much, Joscha. So now we move on to Dennis Gillette. That is, you're the head of the React Group at the Swedish Federal Institute. Exactly. Thank you for that. Thank you for the invitation. Yeah, I'm glad to be here. And it's also thanks to collaboration we have with OCG, and we learn a lot in that framework. It was mainly a project of technology transfer. We have developed a social media platform to support collaborative research at the European level, and we figured out that it was really something which was matching the requirements you had. And we have been working for one year to adapt it to the requirement of MSF. And I think this dialogue and this direct interaction in the framework of the development is really beneficial for the project. But overall, if we look at your question, I would have been glad to have the question, what to do with one million? But that one is easy to answer. What to do with one million to trigger innovation is a bit more challenging. But we don't really need to be innovative to manage innovation, because I think there's already a lot of models which have proven to be effective. So I would see four components of that. So, obviously, the first one is to have a committee to support the process of innovation. And I know that you have already a few committees supporting innovation. In such a committee, I think I see a few important elements to take into account. First of all, it's always good to mix internal and external people, because internal people will bring the strategy and the vision of the organization, and external people will help everybody to open the mind for ideas. And then those people should be somehow at least in their mission disconnected from the operation, because innovation is about mid- and long-term actions, not immediate reaction to a current problem. And then this committee can run the three other components. And one which is useful for technology and scientific watch is to create the MSF prize for innovation. Because obviously, if you want to go and to look at everything which is happening, which could be helpful for the mission of MSF, it could be challenging. If you go to the academic world, people have no time to talk to you or they are not interested. But if you say, okay, there is some prize and recognition for people contributing well to things which can be useful for you, then those people will come to you. So you have to, with that committee, define a scheme which is helping you to trigger or to bring to you this type of ideas. And it will also somehow induce a change in the research that people are doing, because I would think, oh, maybe I can adapt a bit the research I am doing to be able to submit something to the prize. And the two other components, because I think I have one minute, are more classical. It's finished. So the two other components have been already mentioned by my colleagues. Thank you very much. So we move into the last panel member here, Megan McQuire, that has been working for some time as an epidemiologist and now lately working with the health information system for MSF Paris. So I'm stepping in for a Google person, so I'm not as exciting as Google. But I would like to tell you about how we're spending a million euros. OCP took an ambitious initiative about two and a half years ago to solve an issue that I think most sections face. The abundance of Excel spreadsheets that we find in our missions. We went through a process where we brought in both internal and external viewpoints. We looked at a gazillion technology companies. We had other NGOs give us their opinions. And then we decided to partner with a technology company. And it's been a partnership for over a year where we have developed a pretty impressive application that's about to go into piloting phase and will scale up to all OCP missions within nine months, replacing all those lovely Excel spreadsheets. The part that has been challenging communication for sure, but also figuring out how to manage change within an organization that constantly is changing, facilitating the fact that one direction, this way, today, another direction, tomorrow, and constantly keeping up. And part of the way we resolved that was trying to integrate as much as possible into operations and to have operations be who we're responding to, even though our project is embedded in our medical department. And when we think about innovation, at least for this project, it has to respond to the operational needs that are on the ground. It can't be someone sitting somewhere saying, yes, this is a great idea. Let's plug it down into some project and hope it works. It really needs constant feedback, constant process of our job management and incorporating new ideas. The part that I think we're starting to do quite well is we are communicating with other sections. And there is interesting, slightly competitive, sometimes collegial way of us looking at what other health information systems are being thought of in each section. And I do think this is a healthy way that MSF can think about innovation is allow for things to grow and expand and have an agile process of incorporating ideas and showing things off, but doing it in a way that allows for critical feedback. And this is something that I think is still a little bit of a tricky situation for us. Anyways, I'm happy to talk about the information system and the technology later on. Thank you very much, Megan. So I think we got a lot of different and very interesting answers to the question. So obviously, there is not one right answer to this, but many and many ways to fail also, obviously, and to know that we have to learn from those failures rather than just say, no, this doesn't work. And I think you had something very interesting there when you said that we have to manage how to change because it's a lot about the debt. If we're innovative, then we know how to react and how to adapt to constant changing environment. Now I would like to open for questions so we can trigger a discussion here. So please, anybody from the auditorium that feels they have something they want to say or a question to ask? It's all clear. Yes. Hi, very interesting. I'm Andreas from MSF Sweden Innovation Unit. I think it was interesting that several of you mentioned the mix of internal external people and trying to, how should I say this? I mean, the corporate partners, what do you see as the role of kind of not only academia, but corporate partners industry and what do you see as the role of those kind of partners in achieving innovation within MSF? It's really an open question for you all. I'm looking at that one. I can start, I think probably. I think for us when we tried this and we tried this in quite a large way was that for the first time people kind of came and they were quite wary of each other. The corporate people and the humanitarian people both sort of assumed and had a kind of like a general prejudice against each other. But what was surprising and I think that was the first thing that happened is that people also saw that they had similar values and I think that was the beginning of the conversation. And then, of course, it developed on mutual interest. I'll stop there. Yeah, I think that something that sometimes is not completely perceived is that the interest that there's in the private sector to collaborate with MSF and how many different actors would like to collaborate with us and not the other way around, not just feeling taking something, asking a favor if you want, but the interest is mutual or reciprocal. Then the key thing is how to define the terms of collaboration and the win-win situations for both, especially with corporates. Just to echo that point, there's two questions here. What can corporate or academic partners give MSF and then how to facilitate that engagement? On the facilitation front, I think it's essential to have clear ethical guidance for how to engage. On the offer front, there's a tremendous wealth of good practices in knowledge management and innovation processing that's the bread and butter of what private sector organizations do. How you access that in a safe and principled way, that's where it gets into the fine-grained detail. But I often am concerned that sometimes the potential of those actors are simply excluded because of the potential dangers. As for academics, I have to agree with Dennis. I think there's a lot of academics who are happy to work for very little or no funding to have a sense of impact and to understand an organization like MSF better, but I do agree that we do like funding and don't ever underestimate a grad student needs to pay a rent. Thank you. That's interesting, but I would also like to know it's, in practice, it can be quite difficult, I think, to have these collaborations. Of course, it's, as you say, to find a win-win. But how do you do that practically? And what would you think is the best approach to have in order to have long-lasting relationships? Because I think a problem many times is that it's interesting to do something on a shorter matter. You can get some attention and publicity around it. But then when you really need to do it on a long term, then it's not so sexy anymore. How can we avoid those kind of short-term time and resource-consuming collaborations and go for more long-term things that in then will pay off much more? I think you are an interesting segment of the market for the corporate. So if you organize regularly maybe just once a year or a meeting with them, well, you can trigger innovation to those people because you have very specific requirements. So by interacting with you, they can design the product of the future, which would be useful for your mission. And this is maybe missing. You are reactive and you have to see what is coming. All right, we have a question here. Hi, Philip DeCro, MSF. We've started the discussion with a question around resources and talking about collaborations. And I know that there is some groups that are talking about this idea of frugal innovation, the idea that actually having less maybe promotes more innovation. I wonder if the panelists wanted to comment. Maybe we're looking at this in the wrong way. Very good question. It's what you think. One million is not the incentive to create innovation, but perhaps it blocks innovation. Absolutely. I mean, it's a little bit like we got two minutes to speak. It's exactly right. I mean, I think that none of us really could spend. I mean, the funny thing is that we were given a million strikes to spend in a year and we spent less than half of it. And I think that just to sort of connect a little bit the two questions is that there's a lot going on in the healthcare space at the moment to think it's the biggest game in town. But also what's happening is that people are looking at the bottom of the pyramid markets. And really what we're finding is that we're going away from Europe and America to start doing innovation in countries like India and possibly China. So in a sense, the creativity comes out of having these really strict parameters. Yes, we have some questions in the back. I think we have the gentleman there in a black shirt. Thank you. Thank you. I don't know where this works. A lot of the people in the panel talking about innovation seem to me they were talking about processes and systems. And I was just thinking maybe because you are an emergency organization, but relationships. I think there's more innovation when you do stuff through relationships. Is there a lot of investment in relationships with the people on the ground to create innovation? Very good question also I think here. How do we do look beyond the processes and at the people and turn it back into the organization? How do we promote that to happen? Not just talking about processes, but saying that we should think differently, but also to do differently. Who feels like answering this question? If I can start, I would say that a really effective innovation project is a project we do together, even between an external partner and people in the field and people in the organization. And it's a continuous interaction to see what are really the needs and how to implement things. So it's not about funding and giving money to somebody and say come back in two years and show what you have done. No, it's really working continuously for all the duration of the innovation process together. I just add again that when we talk about relationships with people, I mean there's the internal axes of top down and bottom up within MSF, and then there's the communities you work within who often hold a lot of solutions to their own problems in a vacuum of guidance. Those of you familiar with the U.N. innovation lab systems, there's a lot to discuss there, a lot of models that do and don't apply to humanitarian emergency space, but don't forget about the communities themselves as well. Very good point. Yes, the gentleman here with the white shirt. At the back. Sorry. You were first actually, that's right. So first the lady in the back and then the gentleman here. First of all, I'd like to say how my heart was gladdened by that previous question. My name's Jane Cooper. I've gone from public health into organizational studies at the moment and I'm rather with desire on end use of innovation. I think what would be interesting would be to consider the barriers within an organization that are inherently stifling to the process of innovation. I can offer useful references to anybody who wants to get in touch with me afterwards, but I think it is a universal issue. But I think that the structure of MSF offers some particular opportunities in terms of promoting the diversity of approach and some differences between sections. Back on that previous question, and maybe I can work in the question I couldn't ask about the managerial panopticon for Afghanistan national staff. I think that the local staff are a resource that we don't sufficiently value and I think that there would be a great deal of innovation that would come up from national staff if we could avoid looking at them as quantifiable and measurable resources to be appraised. Thank you. Thank you very much. So yeah, to take care of the people inside and then that's where innovation happens and also how do we look at the institutional barriers that we have, but also the possibilities that the structure the organization has. So I think that you can give us a point on this, anyone? Cisco, you can give us an interview here from the internal perspective. Yeah, I think that internally we can look at two different levels. The one that you were mentioning that is the diversity between operational centers, that is a strong point that we shouldn't lose at any moment in terms of advantages in different areas and innovation is one of them. Then there's the tension between the diversity and dispersion and the mapping of all those innovation initiatives and avoiding overlapping or gaps. And this is I think the line of tension where we are trying to manage. Internally speaking in a more vertical way looking at the movement but also at every operational center, governance becomes more and more complex and this makes the structures more rigid and more complicated. Historically we have this flexibility in the kind of relationships and interaction that we have in the organization, but we risk to lose that. So the management of the innovation should promote that fluid. Thank you there Cisco. I know you have a lot more to say and we will continue the discussion afterwards but Ariane is looking at me very very firmly so we will have to round it up there and we will we thank of course the panel here, the excellent panel and thank you all and of course also you online and please comment and tweet if you have something more to add to this discussion. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think and particularly the last point about how do we empower the patients and the people in the field to engage in the process of innovation and to drive the process of innovation versus how do we encourage an institutional approach at the same time and I think that balance is something that is very tricky and something that we have to preserve particularly in MSF. We want to make sure that the people in the field are the ones who are capable of bringing identifying and driving the process of innovation that we support rather than that we take that responsibility on their behalf. With that thank you very much Marpe for an interesting showcase and an interesting discussion around innovation. We have half an hour break so be back here promptly at in 29 minutes exactly. There's two things. First of all the presenters and everyone who's going to be involved in the next session should be gathering here as per normal. Secondly at the exit we're already giving you the forms in order to evaluate because we know at the end of the session there might be an interest of the room to go and have a drink so fill out your forms now so that we can profit from your experience and your inputs. Thank you.