Humanitarian organisation’s use of pro bono services in innovation projects.

There are three main approaches through which humanitarian organisations involve pro-bono resources in their innovation efforts: strategic, random or uninformed. The strategic approach provides the best prospect of a positive impact on the innovation process, while the random and uninformed approach to pro-bono support seems to hinder, rather than benefit, the humanitarian innovation process and progress.

This study reveals that on an overall level, pro-bono services have had limited positive effects on the humanitarian organisations' innovation efforts. A key reason for this, is that the majority of humanitarian organisations and innovation processes are in fact operating with a random approach or with significant knowledge-gaps when entering into such collaborations. There are two main consequences of this. Firstly, when something comes for free, resources in the humanitarian organisation needs to be allocated to ensure that the free service may be integrated into the innovators work. In many of the processes and partnerships assessed in this study, the humanitarian actors end up spending considerable amounts of time and efforts on finding out how to utilise the available resources, rather than actually using it to solve problems and move innovation processes forward. Secondly, as many pro-bono contributions tend to be acquired randomly or from a non-operational unit (Marketing or HR department), the organisations end up with technical services and solutions that do not match the needs of the humanitarian innovators. The innovation process thus shifts direction; the company's offered solution is trying to find a problem, and not the other way around.