Page 35 - DHCI Magazine

Jaap Vuik and Dirk-Jan Otte from Help
a Child excelled when following our accelerator programme, using digitised tools on our platform Source2Gather. Together they reflect on how attracting the right co-creators allowed them to feel the benefits of innovative methods: “DCHI makes collaborative innovation happen. We all know where to find articles and speeches to help us innovate, which can be great...but DCHI makes the step with you to go from knowledge to practice”.
Whether it’s over several months or just
a couple of weeks, DCHI has seen that innovative impact can be achieved when time is taken to tackle a specific challenge in the hope of co-creating a solution with other organisations. Help a Child is a great example of this, as they were ready to use other insights to tackle a challenge. In just under 3 weeks, they followed our coaching to redefine their challenge and publish their call to action on Source2Gather.
New Perspectives on an Existing Challenge
Help a Child did well to use their existing network to attract co-creators and to dive into our innovation process, which was a totally new experience for them. Although they published a challenge on Food Aid
Dutch Coalition for Humanitarian Innovation
Distribution, an aspect of aid that they’re very experienced in, Dirk-Jan and Jaap came into our process with very open minds in realising that there were more valuable perspectives
to be gained in tackling their specific focus for this challenge: “Our pitch resulted in a co-creation session with other organisations that brought in many different but important perspectives...this actually resulted in a
brand new concept called nexus-agriculture, something we never would have come up with without talking to other organisations in a co- creation setting facilitated by DCHI”.
New Concepts & Partners need to be Tested
A crucial part of co-creating on a challenge towards an impactful solution is testing
these new insights. User-testing can be very daunting for humanitarian organisations,
as it requires people on the ground to fully understand what the intentions of the project are, and how they can use a crisis recovery setting in a way to test the new perspectives that have been brought in by partners: “There were really key elements we wanted to test on the ground - We wanted to fail early and fail cheap! But there was a lot of confusion about what a user test exactly was. Our lesson learnt was that you really need to break down the kind of silos that people are used to, which I think is often the case with innovation. People
are so used to working in a certain way, they are so used to specific terminology and a
way of working and now suddenly you want
to do it differently, which can stir up a lot of noise in an organisation. Luckily, once we really grasped what we wanted, and made sure everyone on the ground also understood it, we were in a really good position to start planning the upcoming user test”.
Taking this time to manage expectations and to make sure that everyone in the team is on the same page is key, especially when working with unfamiliar partners and concepts. Despite this being a challenge, Help a Child got stuck in with these new innovative methods with a fantastic mindset and a great user test planned within just 4 months of publishing their call to action on Source2Gather.
“The whole trajectory has really benefited our organisation. This was our first experience
of co-creation, and it will not be our last! We think that this type of innovation and co- creation is what makes DCHI a unique player that will benefit the sector”.
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INTERVIEW