Total Innovation Podcast
Welcome to "Total Innovation," the podcast where I explore all the different aspects of innovation, transformation and change. From the disruptive minds of startup founders to the strategic meeting rooms of global giants, I bring you the stories of change-makers. The podcast will engage with different voices, and peer into the multi-faceted world of innovation across and within large organisations.
I speak to those on the ground floor, the strategists, the analysts, and the unsung heroes who make innovation tick. From technology breakthroughs to cultural shifts within companies, I'm on a quest to understand how innovation breathes new life into business.
I embrace the diversity of thoughts, backgrounds, and experiences that inform and drive the corporate renewal and evolution from both sides of the microphone. The Total Innovation journey will take you through the challenges, the victories, and the lessons learned in the ever-evolving landscape of innovation.
Join me as we explore the narratives of those shaping the market, those writing about it, and those doing the hard work. This is "Total Innovation," where every voice counts and every story matters.
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Total Innovation Podcast
19: Carla Lopez: Humanitarian Crowd Solving Part 2
Carla is a global health practitioner with 15 years of experience working on the stubborn issues that keep poor people in poverty. Her passion is to apply problem-solving approaches from human-centred design, behavioral insights, and the private sector to the development and humanitarian sector. She has worked in markets disrupted by the Ebola outbreak in Liberia and the earthquake in Haiti where the need for health services was heightened, client behaviour was fluid, and best practices were uncertain. These are the conditions under which she thrives: where scrappy, bold initiatives can save the day or yield important insights when they fail.
Her leadership roles have ranged from country director of a team of 154 colleagues during an Ebola outbreak to regional technical advisor for human-centered design and social marketing in Southern Africa. She has worked on products, such as HIV self-testing kits and micronutrient-enriched porridge, and services like male circumcision and community warehouses for smallholder families. She has a knack for finding and cultivating her colleagues' hidden skills and uncovering the important details that influence what makes for a satisfying client experience. She tells good stories and works towards a world where people most affected by crisis and poverty have to power to shape their own future.
See how she’s driving real-world impact through open innovation on the Wazoku Crowd. 👉 International Rescue Committee Showcase
Welcome everyone to the Total Innovation podcast where we explore the cutting edge of innovation and collaboration in tackling some of the world's most complex challenges. As always, I'm your host, Simon Hill. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce a truly remarkable guest. She serves as the director for health innovation at the International Rescue Committee, the IRC, and also their and is also their human centered design practice lead. She's global health practitioner with fifteen years of experience tackling some of the most stubborn issues that perpetuate poverty and inequality around the globe. Her career has taken her to the frontline of some of the most pressing humanitarian crises. As a consequence, she brings a unique perspective on innovation, one far removed from the digital tools and flashy trends we often associate with this term innovation. Her work is rooted in creating solutions that truly meet the needs of the people they serve, a focus maybe we should all embrace. She's recently been at the forefront of spearheading the IRC's journey into humanitarian crowd solving, a groundbreaking approach to tackling complex challenges through a totally new way of thinking and working for the IRC. It's a bold move in a sector where the stakes are high and the risks of experimentation can often feel insurmountable. Yet under her leadership, the IRC embraced this model, launching seven impactful crowd solving challenges that have already driven meaningful change and impacts. This episode will take us through the evolution of this journey from the initial skepticism about trying something so radically different, to the lessons learned on the ground, to what the future holds for humanitarian crook crowdsolving. So if you're passionate about innovation that truly makes a difference, this is one conversation you will not want to miss. And with that, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Carla Lopez. Welcome, Carla. Thanks, Simon, for that kind introduction. I'm delighted to be here. Yeah. This is an exciting topic. It's a little bit different. You're a part of a short series that we're doing around this topic of humanitarian crowd solving, and, you'll have come shortly after an episode that we'll have done with with Harry and and the and the work that he brought. And maybe that's a good place to to lead in, right, to provide a little bit of context around IRC's work. I gave a little bit in the introduction there, but let's talk around, you know, your career, your role at IRC. Maybe set the scene a little bit for people. Right? What does what does your role support within IRC, and what does innovation as I said, it's a bit different in the in this setting. What does it mean? Yeah. I I'm glad that you're bringing up what innovation means to us because that's a term that I think, can mean so many different things to different people and in some way has, I think, lost some meaning. So for us at the IRC, you know, we think about innovation innovation as, fresh ways for, serving our clients more meaningfully. And by clients, I mean, people who have been displaced by disaster. Increasingly, this is natural disasters. Conflict always plays a role. And increasingly, this also includes the local partners that, we collaborate with, to provide these services. Now one of the things that makes the IRC unique is that we try to think about evidence, as a basis upon which to make a lot of decisions because, you know, like every other humanitarian and development organization, we our our funding to do our work is very precious. Our need always, is greater than the resources we have to serve the people, who are are facing these difficult conditions. So we need to be really careful about what we invest in. So for us, innovation means a variety of things that are new to our sector, the humanitarian sector. And that includes everything from, you know, doing impact evaluations. Right? For a long time, impact evaluations, have not been done in our sector because, you know, we're so passionate about serving people and everybody, has is is worthy of need, worthy worthy of services. So why should we waste funds doing impact evaluations? And the IRC has been a really big driver in normalizing the need for impact evaluations to allow us to make sound decisions about what services are really having the impact we intend and which are failing to do so or falling short of our expectations. Impact to us also means doing cost efficiency and cost effectiveness studies. Again, this might be the norm in other sectors, but for us, this is a new way of thinking about our responsibility, in deciding how to use our limited resources to serve our clients. We're also thinking about things like, new financing mechanisms for serving our clients. So we're not just sort of sitting back with the the model of waiting for generous donors, to provide us the funds we need to do our work. And also thinking about the kinds of services we do, we're really committed to cash distribution to clients so that they can make their own choices for themselves and their families about how to use that cash. And, again, this is, supported by evidence. And my role at the IRC, is in integrating human centered design across the board, across the sectors in which we work, whether that's, livelihoods or climate change or health, to ensure that we are actually understanding problems in the way that our clients view the problems and not just in a sort of our our siloed way of programming, which, you know, we we can all agree that a siloed approach is not great. But the reality is our funding is siloed. We have donors who are interested in, say, agriculture or health, and therefore our programming stems from that. But, of course, that's now not how our clients or any of us think about our lives. Our problems are in the context of of many experiences that we have, many demands on our time, different priorities. And if we lose sight of that, we run the risk of investing in either problems that are not relevant to our clients or not their top priorities or misunderstanding the root causes of the problems. It's a really helpful setting. Right? And I think that as you're talking and as as we did some pre discussions around this, I was thinking about it's kind of beautifully profound, the level of innovation and complexity that exists because of the stakes. Right? There's something quite quite unique about about this. But as you as we talked pre now and as, you know, I'll try and sort of tease out and share with people, it isn't just the high stakes limited resources components of what the specific setting and challenges are for innovation in this. It's you know, there's a pure contextual piece that, you know, there isn't I'm sure you'd love many high-tech solutions, but they're just not very practical in the settings that you're that you're working in as well. So maybe just, like, just set that scene. You know, most people listening are not gonna be as familiar with, you know, the the very difficult context in which you're trying to create positive outcomes. Right? There's value there's mission of value for innovation. It's pretty raw as well when you're thinking about, you know, the the context that you're working in. So maybe just paint that picture a little bit for for folk. Yeah. So I think when people think about refugees and humanitarian organizations and humanitarian work, that might conjure an image of, you know, a UN run refugee camp with tidy rows of white tents, and, you know, highly organized, situation. And while those certainly exist in the world, the vast majority of our clients, are not in these structured, organized spaces, but are very dispersed, in a very rural context or are even living in urban settings in informal settlements. And, both of those contexts well, a lot of what we have to think about is how do we reach people efficiently when they don't have access, say, to phone networks, much less the Internet. So, you know, one of the go to, things that we do when we think about scaling solutions is making them digital because that's both cheap and a way of reaching a lot of people. But for many contexts in which the IRC works, that's simply not an option. And a lot of the the programming that we do focuses on on women, women as heads of household, women as decision makers for young children, women, and their sexual reproductive health, for example. And in places where households may have access to a phone, may have money to buy phone credits, that phone is often not held by the woman. It's held by a male health head of household. So any kind of technology that presumes reaching women or community health workers through phones is going to be quite limited. I was think having a conversation yesterday with colleagues about, getting malnutrition treatment, to children who need it in South Sudan. And the good news is that we know how to treat malnutrition. We know how to prevent children under the age of five from dying from malnutrition. There's a treatment. There's a protocol. It works. The bad news is that the children who need it most are the hardest to reach. So in some times of the year in South Sudan, for example, getting cartons of the treatment to children involves, the lack of roads. The low roads are completely unusable because they're underwater, which means we need to use small planes in airstrips where those airstrips are not completely inundated by mud to get the solution part of the way there. And then we contract people with small boats to go across flooded areas, and then people are physically carrying boxes of these treatments to the last mile locations. So those are the conditions in which we typically work. So when we think about innovation, it's not gonna be the shiny, techy gadget. It's gonna be things that are resilient, that are robust, and that work through existing structures in these kinds of places. Yeah. That's that's I mean, you know, it sends my mind off in lots of different directions, not least just the, you know, the context of most people's innovation challenges versus the real world challenges that that you guys are you guys are facing. So let's now let's now take that. That setting is you know, you've you've you've painted the picture really nicely for the audience. Right? It's a complex, very raw, very real setting. There's a sort of business model challenge in there as well as that your funding comes, as you said, for very specific things or very specific projects. It's hard to look longer term because that's what they're and then you're presented with this idea of humanitarian crowd solving. Right? Piece of the the portfolio of the work that we do that I'm super proud of. Right? Because it helps the real the real things like this. But talk to me a little bit about how this first came on your radar, what your initial thoughts and experiences were. Have you ever even heard the term humanitarian crowd solving before? No. The short answer is we had not. We were approached by Harry and Lydia Sangri who had, worked with Wazoku on crowdsolving before with other organizations, sister organizations to us, and had great interest in this. And they approached the IRC saying, like, hey. We we're believers in this. We have seen it work in other contexts. Are you interested in giving this a go? And what was really attractive about, their proposition is that they were willing to derisk this for us, by paying a lot of the costs involved in us trying this. But that in and of itself did not guarantee success. While I mean, I described to you all the things that the IRC does that we feel are innovative in the humanitarian sector, but innovation isn't always a welcome term. And that's for a couple of very good reasons. One, I think the image that is conjured by that term is one of the flashy, shiny solution that someone developed far, far away that's looking for a problem rather than a well articulated problem in search of a solution. And so we've had a lot of, you know, collective experience with people with a lot of influence saying, we we have found the solution. Please be very grateful for it and now use it without a full appreciation of, our our conditions of working. And you made reference to our funding cycles. Not only do we, you know, operate in a very sort of siloed space because of how we receive funding, but in the humanitarian sector, our funding cycles are very short. Meaning, we receive funding that only covers, you know, if we're lucky, eighteen to twenty four months. And I just described to you what it's like to deliver services in a place like South Sudan during the rainy season. It takes a lot of time and effort to do what seemingly on paper is a very simple thing. So that is one sort of, piece of baggage that we have in innovation. And the second is that many of my colleagues at the IRC are technical experts in their field, whether that's malnutrition or, climate smart agriculture. And they work day in and day out to help us, implement and integrate what they see as gold standards into our work, and that is incredibly difficult to do. And so in some parts of the organization, understandably, we say, well, if we haven't yet figured out how to implement the gold standard of programming, why should we divert our funds into innovation which comes with no guarantees of success? And so those are real reasons for why I am very choosy in deciding when to introduce innovation or something new to my colleagues. Right? Like, I have to be very I have to curate that very well. So when Harry and Lydia came to us with this, humanitarian crowd solving initiative, it seemed really exciting. But, even though we just we took them up on their offer, it wasn't without a lot of consideration whether of whether this is what we should be spending our our social and political internal capital on. And because they derisked it for us, and because they said, you know, we can give this a go if it doesn't meet your expectations. No harm, no foul. And so we decided to to try it, and I'm I'm so glad that we did. Which is a great follow on to to to where we go later on in this, in the in this podcast. What what was it about this thing? Because, you know, I I think that there's probably a an element of, let's call it arrogance for one to a better word in the if someone's walking in your door and Innovators are like, well, you know, there's money coming here to this thing, and you're right to be skeptical because the other side of that is, like, lots of people want to bring the next shiny object, the next great solution. But the reality is the day to day stack of things that need to urgently get done is getting bigger and bigger and more and more complicated, and the world isn't getting any easier in the realms that you that you guys deal in. And there's a million shiny objects that you've tried before. So what was it about this that that peaked your interest at other than the derisking? Right? You know, because it's a brand new concept and, you know, maybe just set the scene of what it what it was in your mind before we get into what it was in reality when you were when you were thinking about it as well. Yeah. So the uncharitable, interpretation of what crowdsolving could be, is having a bunch of, tech bros around the world say, I have the solution for humanitarian problems. You should have just asked me sooner, and I would have told you what it was. And then having what they're proposing to be wildly disconnected with our context and our realities, and then us spending, time we don't have to sort of, you know, explain, all the reasons why that solution is not, fit for purpose for us. So that was my worst fear. But that was quickly dispelled because, you know, the Sangres had worked with sister organizations, so Habitat for Humanity and World Vision. And they came to us with clear case studies for not only how crowdsolving was utilized, but what the outcomes were and how those organizations are now integrating those solutions into their programming. So that was, that did a huge amount of work in in helping us sort of overcome our initial hesitancy. And the other is what is the value proposition of crowd solving to me initially was being able to do work that our colleagues simply don't have the bandwidth to do. So we are we are problem solvers in the humanitarian space. To be able to deliver services every day to our clients under the conditions in which we work, we need to be scrappy. We are constantly putting out fires. We're never sitting back and saying, oh, we find something perfectly, and now we just execute. Right? But we are also, every one of us, doing more than a hundred percent of one job. We're covering for colleagues. New situations come up. Somebody needs to respond to them. And under those conditions, it is very difficult for any single person, particularly the people who understand the problems the best, to pause their day to day work in ensuring services are consistently delivered to our clients, to take a step back and say, What if we didn't approach the problem in this way? What if instead of putting out fires and slapping Band Aids on this, we took a different perspective to this problem? That's just something we don't have the room to do. And it's not because we're not good at it. It's not because we our colleagues aren't just whip smart and very insightful and driven. We just don't have the time. And so crowd solving presented itself to me as something where, you know, if we did a good job to characterize the problem, to make the context really clear to others, to clearly delineate what characteristics a solution must have to meet our needs, then other people are willing to invest their time and energy that we don't have to work on this for us. And we're not losing, any control. Right? We're not signing on to say yes to whatever gets thrown to us. On the contrary, because we have done the work to figure out, okay, really, what are the characteristics that would solve for our context? We are in a decision making position to be able to say, yes. These solutions are fascinating. They do meet our criteria, and these do not. So we're not relinquishing control at any point in the crowd solving, which I think was another fear, that that I and my colleagues shared. So one of the important roles I think of of the innovation folk inside organizations is to, you know, receive these kind of things, filter out the things that are not relevant. But when you do get those, oh, this could be relevant and exciting, and I wanna bring it to the business to go and then find the buy in. Right? Get the buy in from this, which in this case isn't just a, yeah, this looks like an interesting thing. Let's give it a go because you have to sink your teeth into it properly. Right? And to your point around not being able to stop and step back and think and do differently, that's what was required here. Right? So how did you get from the idea being an interesting thing? You know, we've got over the initial skepticism. You've got some convinced, internal stakeholders, including yourself, that this could be relevant. Now you've gotta get into buy in and actually getting people to run the programs, run the challenge, and embrace the concept. Talk to me a little bit about that process from this sounds great to getting challenges launched into the market. Yeah. I have to say, the the journey was a bit unexpected, starting with, you know, sourcing the right problems for crowdsolving. And I think the Wazoku team was did a really nice job of working with us to really understand, like, you know, not every compelling problem is going to be a route right fit for crowdsolving, so that's great. But even once we understood that, in an organization as big as ours and, you know, we're at least twenty eight thousand people around the world, It's hard to know where to start, in finding people who would be interested in collaborating and and taking this risk along with us, while also, making sure that the challenge, the problem that they're identifying is the right fit. So we knew I knew that there was gonna be a lot of trial and error along the way. And one of the things that was a bit unexpected in that journey, is that we, as an organization, are really good at, describing a problem and saying, here's a solution that we think we are uniquely qualified to deliver on. And it's supported by evidence and experience, and here are all the reasons why this is the right solution. That's something we're really good at. We have decades of experience in the context in which we work and technical experts and people with frontline experience. So we are primed to talk about the problems hand in hand with, and here's how we're solving it. And what crowdsolving asks of us is the opposite of that. It's to say, here's the problem and here's why our existing efforts to solve it fall short, and we need help from people who are not necessarily experts in the humanitarian field or this technical area to solve it. And that is an incredibly difficult mind shift to take. So in trying to get buy in in the organization, I was really skeptical when I would talk to team leaders or country program directors and and would get an immediate yes. That sounds great. Like, when someone says yes. That sounds great, that is a big red flag to me because what that means is you're not fully sort of absorbing the implications of what I'm proposing to you, and I have not done a great job of explaining that to you. So, eventually, we we spent literally months sort of trying to find the right stakeholders in the organization who had both the decision making power, and had the time and interest to fully comprehend what we were proposing. And I think what's really great about the international rescue committee is if we can get buy in from our colleagues who work in country program offices, who understand the problems and our clients really well, that is often, the green light we need to proceed. Right? If we can say the work we are doing is in service of our colleagues on the ground and they have indicated that this is a value to them, then that that just opens things up for us. And we after several months of talking to groups across this organization, we got our first sort of bite from a combination of colleagues in our Sierra Leone prop, program country program office as well as colleagues across several of our, technical groups, our pharmacy technical group, our governance and power technical group. And so that collective buy in from different teams across the organization around a single problem really, unlocked a lot of goodwill, and optimism about trying this. I think, actually, there's loads of parallels and, you know, every lots of sectors think that there's lots of nuance or lots of companies think there's lots of nuance, and there is a lot of nuance to the context in which you work. But often when you put yourself in the most difficult of situations, the most challenging, the most budget constrained, you find a lot of the the realities of life that are that are that need to actually be boiled back up into settings that are a lot easier for a lot of people with more money available and less risk around the innovation programs that still face the same challenges. Right? You know, focus on the people at the cutting edge who understand the problem. It seems like really obvious advice. And, yes, it it makes a lot of sense, but you gotta go find those people as well. Right? Talk to me talk to me a little bit about then around, you know, some of the challenges that you've you've run. You know? It took a while to learn, and I think it does. It's a capability. It's a different way of tackling things. It's a different form of, you know, everything to do with identity comes out of this. As you said, people are specialists in doing this. The idea that someone who doesn't know anything about your sector and this problem could do a a job around this that they can't do even if it's a can't do because they haven't got time is a little bit challenging for folk. And so let's talk a bit about, you know, from that skepticism to now finding these teams in different corners of planet Earth and very different problem spaces. Like, what have you what are some of the successes from the from the different challenges that you've run? What can you share? Well, the the learning curve was, very steep for us in that first challenge, for a couple of reasons. I think anyone who's done any kind of innovation work can relate to the the the craft necessary to right size a problem. You don't want it to be so broad, that is the solution is, hard to recognize when you arrive at it. But also, if it's too narrow, you're presupposing what the solution is. So finding the the Goldilocks, problem, is quite challenging, and it's not something I think everyone has a lot of experience doing. And then, of course, when you and I talked before, I had mentioned that, you know, in the humanitarian space, sometimes, you know, we become overwhelmed by the complexities that we deal with. Right? And so the the first challenge that we ran in talking to our colleagues to really identify what the problem is, it felt a little bit like a therapy session because they were like, well, you know, the challenge is we're responsible for getting essential medicines in Sierra Leone from, you know, the central medical store all the way to the last mile help post in really remote places under different weather conditions, and the roads are terrible. And the trucking companies we use break down all the time, and there's this and there's that. And it's like, yes. This is all your reality, and it is incredibly hard, and I see you. But we at the IRC are not gonna fix the roots, and we're not gonna start our own trucking company, and we're not gonna deliver things by drone. So what is the element within that ecosystem of the problem that we can take on and unlock to have, the greatest potential, impact on this problem, which is trying to get as many of these essential medicines in good condition to last mile health posts to be able to treat people. And so that process really allowed all of us to learn how to craft the right size challenge, with enough definition to be a good fit for crowd solving. And the Wazoku team really was just incredibly skilled and patient in helping us get there. And even when we thought we had crafted, like, we'd gone from this very murky, nebulous problem to something that was really well defined, You know, there were they the Wazoku team continued to ask us questions around, like, if someone proposed something like this, would that suit your need, or do you do we have to word it differently? And I think that also built a lot of confidence in me and in my colleagues to really understand how much control we had over this this process. We weren't just opening ourselves up to be inundated by, you know, well intentioned but weak solutions. And after that first challenge, we were then able to say to other colleagues, look. This is what we did in the first challenge. Here's the process we used, and then have the colleagues who proposed that problem speak of their own experience to our colleagues. Right? So it felt less like we were trying to sell some new thing that we've never done before to our colleagues and more around sharing the experience of that work and defining for ourselves what the value of the Wazoku crowd solving was. So for example, one of the challenges that I I just I will think about always, was around providing better, more robust, lighting and locking mechanisms for female latrines in camps and settlements. So oftentimes not oftentimes, almost always, these locations are off grid, and lighting is quite limited, which means that these latrine banks, which are, you know, constructed out of wood or corrugated aluminum with a pit in the ground, are are pitch black at night. And so women and girls are hesitant to use them, when it's not light outside and are forced to use buckets or what have you in their shelters as a result because they feel like it's very insecure. There's risk of sexual violence, by entering these spaces at night. But if you were to put a simple sort of solar panel, solar charged light there, that would be stolen in an instant. So we crafted a challenge around this. It was a successful challenge in that we identified many lighting and locking, solutions that we we think meet our needs. But one of the most interesting things that came out of that challenge were a number of solutions that did not look at LEDs or solar panels, technologies that we're familiar with, but instead proposed something completely new to us at the IRC, which is lighting from phosphorescence. So strontium aluminate is the chemical component that results in phosphorescence. And so we were all familiar, obviously, with, like, you know, glow in the dark things from our childhood, but this is next next next level from from those glow in the dark stickers. And what this, allow it so this is not a replacement for LED lights, but this is a low level glow that does not require wires and batteries and solar panels, which, are huge cost to us, very easily stolen, and often not robust enough to withstand the elements for a prolonged period of time. And instead, we can incorporate this this chemical in a number of different substrates that absorb light from the sun during the day and provide a low level glow in the evening. And then we what we were so interested in this new technology that we ran a subsequent challenge based solely on this lighting technology. Now the challenge was, you know, to give people something to imagine and react to, we scoped it around lighting female latrines. But the applications of this technology are honestly limitless. So imagine you are helping deliver a baby in the evening and say you have a charge on your mobile phone that gives you a light through your torch. You want to use that very sparingly during the course of this delivery. And so if you're saving that torchlight, you don't want to sit around in pitch dark. Right? But imagine a situation in which you had a low, warm, ambient glow to be able to provide services at night that is an alternative to pitch darkness. That could be used in health facilities. It could be used for, having small businesses stay open later in the evening, for female latrines. There's so many applications of this technology. And now that we have prototypes from this crowd solving challenge to work with to make this concept tangible and real. We can put this to colleagues in Somalia, in Sierra Leone, in Afghanistan and say, hey. You're here's one version of this completely new technology. Let's try it in different context and see, where where it could add value or what the limitations of this are or how it could be combined with other technologies to add value. And and that to me was is one of the most exciting and interesting parts of this crowd solving challenge work. And, you know, it's part of the reason I love doing this kind of work in this kind of space. Right? Because you found this in many senses, as you said, you draw some parallels back to sort of the glow sticks or things that you might think of as as kids, but you pulled in this adjacent innovation that was not far away from the space we were thinking about when we were crafting this challenge, but but came from a different angle that's extremely low cost, extremely scalable, and will just have impact on millions and millions of lives as we get this thing going. So thank you for sharing that. Thank you for enabling it as well. Right? I think that there's a that learning curve was important upfront to get us to some of these these incredible outcomes that we've had from from many of these that I could probably do a podcast on each of the different successes we've had, but I know that's one that, as you said earlier, you'll think about ever, and and I'm very proud of it as well. Looking ahead, I know we were kind of running out of time on this, on this chat because there's so much to discuss, so many good things, such a fascinating world for doing innovation in. What do you what do you see the future looks like then? Right? We've got seven challenges with a learning curve behind you. You now know what humanitarian crowd solving is and can talk eloquently about it with some great with some great great stories. How do you see it evolving within IRC, and and what's your what's your advice to others around who may may be listening to this thinking, this does sound pretty cool, actually. What what what should we be doing? Yeah. I mean, I I am I have drunk the Kool Aid. I started off, as I mentioned, with with some initial skepticism, and learned a lot by doing and now, feel like I fully understand the value of humanitarian crowd solving to to support us in both, you know, having a net a global network of people spend time on things that we don't have to spend and also introduce skills and expertise that we may not have in house, and be able to identify analogous technologies, that could have applications that we had not considered to the humanitarian space. However, I think in order for us to optimize the value of humanitarian crowd solving in our organization, we need to do two things. One, we need to be able to, keep the momentum going on getting new challenges out there because the the group of colleagues who have been involved in these seven challenges so far are now experts in how to do this. Right? They also have been learning by doing. But we want to expand that group, to others, and we want to keep this moment this momentum going so that we're continuously learning, and we're not sort of, like, learning then stopping and then having to pick up and learn this all over again with a new set of people. The other thing is, you know, once we've arrived at a solution, that solution needs to be implemented before we can say it is a raging success. Right? So I spoke about my excitement about phosphorescent lighting, and we have plans. We're prototyping it now. We hope to be able to pilot it in this the coming months in Somalia. But we need to figure out as an organization how we create that pathway from identifying a solution to actually field testing it in our context and then implementing it. Now for something like phosphorescent lighting, I think what that pathway looks like is identifying colleagues who instinctively see these prototypes not as the solution to all their lighting problems everywhere, but as a potential. Right? The starting point for figuring out, well, maybe it won't work for this use case, but it might work for that one. Let's figure out how to tweak it to continue to work on this to figure it out. Those people are rare, and those connections need to be built and supported, and they need to be set up to succeed. But, also, we need to figure out for some of the more sort of future facing technologies that have come out of our crowd solving, how do we position ourselves as an org humanitarian organization to influence some of these emerging technologies that have yet to be proven because they might be working in an analogous space, but we don't want to be left behind. We don't want this humanitarian context to be left behind as these emerging technologies get developed. So we don't want solutions for, you know, health providers being able to sanitize their hands to to avoid infections at health facilities. We don't want these to be optimized only for hospitals in rich countries. We want to be able to say, hey. What would it take to make this work for an off grid health facility in a rural location? And we don't feel like that's a that's limiting tech technology. We feel like, taking our context into consideration can actually fuel technology, can can result in innovative leaps in our way of working rather than iterative change. So I think that we need to better define what kind of role we want to play in being an influencer in the space for some of the more emerging technologies. And we also need to cultivate, a network of colleagues within the IRC to both invite more crowd solving challenges, but also ensuring that they result those the solutions, once identified, lead to impact and implementation at scale. Great. And I I think there's so much more we could pull on here, and I would love to, and we'll pick this up offline for respect of your time as much as anything. I as I said, I think there's something very pure and very authentic about as you positioned it there. Right? Rather than changing the context, almost working up from the context you work in to drive the right types of innovation for the greatest utility rather than the other way around, which is what it tends to happen. Right? And so, lots to think about. Lots and lots of inspiring stories. I thank you very, very much for your time and for just being very honest with with this as well. Maybe I'll ask you for one parting thought. Right? Like, your for other other leaders across the humanitarian space in innovation or otherwise that might might be thinking about this, what's your one piece of advice or one takeaway that you would like to leave them from for today? I mean, to be honest, and I wanna say Simon is not paying me to say this, I think you should try one crowd solving challenge because that learning curve was very, very steep, and I think it really helped our team understand the the value of crowd solving to us in, being able to draw upon skills and resources that we don't have and imagine solutions that we hadn't yet considered. So if you already think you know what the solution is, then that's great. I envy you. But if you're interested in sort of exploring questions outside of of what you think you already understand, I would say give it a shot. You're very kind, Carla. And I honestly wasn't teeing that up either, so thank you for for for for that final thought and recommendation. Thank you to everyone for listening. If you'd like to learn more about humanitarian crowd solving, either as a potential tool for your organization or how to get involved as a solver to these humanitarian opportunities, They'll share some useful links in the episode overview and on social afterwards. You can also check out the supporting podcast I referenced earlier with Harry Sangri who enabled the great work, with for Carla and the team at the IRC, where we'll explore the topic further and deeper from Harry's, altruistic perspective as well. To learn more about the work of the IRC, check out their website, and you can find Carla on LinkedIn where she often shares fascinating insights of her work, which as we've heard today is truly fascinating, inspiring, complex, and amazing. So thank you so much, Carla, for all that you do. Thank you for your time today, and thank you again for sharing so openly.
