Innovation at IRC: 'What can we do to make the sector better?'

SAN FRANCISCO — Staff at the Airbel Center, the research and development arm of the International Rescue Committee, worked with experts in machine learning at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, to develop an algorithm that would better match refugees with jobs in the locations where they were placed. “Initially, my thought was: ‘This is going to be a marginal improvement,’” said Ravi Gurumurthy, chief innovation officer at humanitarian response organization IRC. But the results showed a 40 percent improvement, building on a list of examples that point to why IRC is working across disciplines to design and test solutions for people affected by crisis. “There are design organizations like IDEO, consultants like McKinsey, behavioral sciences teams like Ideas42,” Gurumurthy said. “We are trying to be a real hybrid between these different methods. You need the rigor of RCTs [randomized controlled trials], the focus on what’s desirable and user friendly that designers can bring, and the focus on cost modeling and business model strategy consultants can bring … And we have this combination of implementation, plus in-house innovation capacity.” Gurumurthy joined IRC in 2013, having previously been employed by the United Kingdom government, where he first worked for David Miliband, now president and chief executive officer of IRC. He was initially brought on as vice president for strategy and innovation, and he led a strategy refresh, which resulted in the creation of his chief innovation officer role. Gurumurthy said he built a team that could take risks and uncover ideas with potential for impact, whether or not IRC would be the organization to implement those innovations. “My mandate is to make an impact on outcomes, whichever the best way to do that is,” he said. “We ask not, ‘What can we do to enable IRC to be better?’ — which is probably the sort of conversation everybody else has — but, ‘What can we do to make the sector better?’ … The real game is thinking about how you deliver this beyond NGOs generally, so I will always be biased towards that rather than trying to do it for IRC.” One example is reducing intimate partner violence, Gurumurthy said. Many programs respond to the violence, but the IRC team researched the factors that lead to violence, then developed materials to help couples talk through topics such as sex and finances in order to prevent violence and change behavior. As they explored what delivery vehicles made the most sense, they identified religious pastors as key partners, given their role in premarital counseling, and brought World Vision on board as an implementing partner given their relationships with faith leaders. “Real scale involves partnerships.” --— Ravi Gurumurthy, chief innovation officer at IRC “Real scale is not the IRC delivering it,” he said, explaining that the organization has an $800 million budget a year with work across 30 countries. “Real scale involves partnerships.” Gurumurthy and his team are working with Innovations for Poverty Action and World Vision on an SMS program that will begin in bars then continue on mobile phone apps in Liberia, and a couples counseling program conducted by faith leaders in Uganda. With every innovation project, IRC follows a similar basic structure: Understand the context, study the evidence base, and then analyze what technology opportunities might change this outcome. One low-tech innovation Gurumurthy is particularly excited about is color-coded, rather than numbers-based, tape measuring degrees of malnutrition in South Sudan for low-literacy health workers. In December, IRC — together with Sesame Workshop — won a $100 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation as part of its 100&Change competition, so the NGO will be able to educate Syrian refugee children at a scale it could not have imagined without that grant. “My team is about making small bets initially and then gradually bigger bets,” Gurumurthy said. “This was a bit unusual, because it was essentially going straight to big bets.” Having previously worked in government, one of the major adjustments for Gurumurthy since entering the humanitarian sector is the smaller budgets. “I do think one of the biggest problems is scale in the whole industry, and I don’t think scale is separate from innovation — I often think you need to innovate in order to scale,” he said. Since becoming chief innovation officer in June 2016, Gurumurthy has hired people with different skill sets working in conjunction with others across the organization, with about 15 people between New York and Washington, D.C., and a smaller group based in Jordan and Lebanon. “We couldn’t just innovate within our existing structures,” he said. “The way we needed to work was to be able to lead multidisciplinary teams that combine those skills with the implementing and technical expertise that we already have in the organization.” The three main skill sets IRC has sought out are behavioral science, human-centered design, and strategy. Over the past year, there has also been more of an emphasis on technology, and machine learning in particular, although this has primarily been in partnership with other organizations, Gurumurthy said. Since joining IRC, Gurumurthy has reduced the organization’s reliance on outside staff, hiring people from some of the leading consulting firms, and bringing them in house. Gurumurthy wants to get IRC innovation team members out of their comfort zones. For example, there is a tension between the disciplines of design and behavioral science and strategy, he said. The only way to create a new method, for instance where designers focus more on measurement and researchers focus more on prototyping, is by bringing the team together repeatedly, Gurumurthy said. The Airbel Center, which is home to the innovation team, is a semiautonomous center, so that staff there can understand IRC’s organizational culture, benefit from existing skills, and tap into the implementing capacity of IRC, while operating in a more agile environment than some of their peers. Without the autonomy the Airbel Center has, innovation teams can end up providing support for field offices, but losing control once the idea is up and running, Gurumurthy said. IRC’s research and development team wanted to make sure it was able to see ideas through, from initial design stage right through tech and scale. Gurumurthy sees innovation happening in three stages: Designing, testing, scaling, with lots of iteration in between. “We wanted to make sure we maintain a certain degree of control of the process for longer than is typical,” he said. Update, June 1, 2018: This article has been updated to clarify that the IRC has an $800 million annual budget.