Innovation at Mercy Corps: How to make solutions last

SAN FRANCISCO — Last week, Mercy Corps hosted an event in San Francisco, California, explaining how new technologies and investing in social ventures helps the organization to improve the lives of millions of people. The global humanitarian group has had a number of people take its lead on innovation, including Ann Mei Chang, who joined from Google and then went on to lead the Global Development Lab at the United States Agency for International Development. Six months ago, Myriam Khoury took on the task, building on two decades of work with the Portland, Oregon-based organization. As part of a series of conversations with chief innovation officers at aid organizations around the world, Devex sat down with Khoury to talk about Mercy Corps’ approach to innovation in the drive to achieve outcomes such as better harvests, stronger ecosystems for entrepreneurship, or healthier families. “Our approach to innovation is about putting bold ideas into action,” she said. “And the reason we care about putting bold ideas into action is we want to solve and break through on the world’s toughest challenges.” Khoury began her career in the Balkans and Caucasus, before going on to lead Mercy Corps’ New Initiatives team, and directing its Technical Support Unit, which sets strategy, conducts research, and advises teams in 40 countries. Now, her responsibilities include overseeing the team behind the Social Venture Fund, which provides early-stage financing and post-investment support for social enterprises and “scalable, self-sustaining businesses that improve people’s lives in an enduring way.” The results so far include nine investments, 500,000 customers impacted, and $4.2 million in additional income for smallholder farmers. She echoed the words of her chief executive officer Neal Keny-Guyer, who spoke with Devex at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in the assertion that world-class organizations need to be world class in their use of technology, particularly given increasingly complex global challenges. “These are complicated problems, and if there were silver-bullet solutions, we’d all be using them now,” she said. “Technology in and of itself does not equal innovation. We’re clear on that. But we’re also clear that technology is putting up these previously unimagined solutions that could help us break through on some tough challenges.” Her past positions at Mercy Corps taught her the power of partnerships, and she spoke about the role that Silicon Valley companies and others can play not only in terms of funding but also in terms of technical expertise. The ethos of testing, iterating, and learning — brought to Mercy Corps through partnerships with companies like Palantir, Google.org, and Cisco, which signed a five-year partnership with the organization last year to bring technology to humanitarian response and disaster assistance — have impacted the way Mercy Corps works, leading it to become more of a learning organization. “We want to be among the most innovative social change organizations in the world. We think we have a specific role to play, and we recognize we can’t go it alone.” --— Myriam Khoury, innovation lead at Mercy Corps But while there is growing excitement about the potential for partnership with Silicon Valley, Khoury emphasized the importance of also working alongside local and global partners, always approaching problems and solutions from the point of view of the communities Mercy Corps serves. “We want to be among the most innovative social change organizations in the world,” she said. “We think we have a specific role to play, and we recognize we can’t go it alone.” She talked about the value of looking for inspiration outside the organization, explaining how the groups the Social Venture Fund supports have inspired her when it comes to being ambitious, taking smart risks, and going beyond the status quo. Mercy Corps aims to bridge the gap between the worlds of social entrepreneurship and international development, she said. According to a report Devex published last year, intermediaries such as incubators and accelerators can play an important role in making donors and entrepreneurs more accessible to one another. Mercy Corps works to play that facilitation role, for example through the Innovation Investment Alliance, a partnership between USAID and the Skoll Foundation, with support from Mercy Corps. The partnership has invested $50 million in social entrepreneurs who had proven themselves at a smaller scale and were charting a path to growth, Khoury said. It has taught her a lot about what does and does not work to scale, she added. Learnings from the partnership are captured in Scaling Pathways, a report from the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University. “How can we get better at accelerating breakthrough solutions to the toughest challenges that have worked?” Khoury said. She called this the central question of her work, and said she too has to think through pathways to scale, which she describes as a challenge for the international development sector as a whole. “How do we take a model that is working well in one location and try to replicate it in a way that works in a different context?” she asked. “That’s why this role was created. We’re trying to identify and test and be more quick and transparent about refining those big powerful ideas that transcend geography and could be scaled.” One example of a project aimed at scale is Agrifin Accelerate, a six-year program supported by the Mastercard Foundation and implemented by Mercy Corps. The idea is to bring actors together across the agricultural value chain to leverage technologies like digital financial services in a way that benefits smallholder farmers. DigiFarm, a connected farmer platform, resulted from a collaboration between Safaricom, the leading mobile network operator in Kenya, and a startup focused on alternative credit scoring, but it remains to be seen whether it would take off as quickly elsewhere. “We feel like we’re starting to hone in on a model that is bringing together these different actors and starting to hit big numbers,” she said. “But the question yet to be answered on that is what does it look like in different geographies?” All too often, scale is defined in terms of numbers, but what Khoury is really looking for is meaningful impact, she said, adding that a randomized controlled trial is underway for DigiFarm in Kenya. “There is an element of scale that is continuing to go beyond the life of a grant program,” she added. “There are big improvements we want to make in the results we’re getting, right? Part of that is about making sure the work we’re doing endures beyond the cycle of a grant. We’ve done a good job in many places on that, but man, we can’t be satisfied with where we are right now. Scale is a way we're trying to challenge ourselves on that. It’s also about longevity of the solution.” What makes innovation at Mercy Corps particularly challenging, but also sets it up as a model for others, is that the organization works in some of the most fragile contexts. The role of innovation lead has gone through many iterations, but for Khoury, “it’s about reinforcing and enhancing an overall culture of innovation at Mercy Corps,” where she says everyone understands it is their right and responsibility to work in innovative ways. She wants to see Mercy Corps work on solutions that extend across boundaries, without reinventing the wheel from one geography to another, while still recognizing important country differences. “I’m trying to make sure we hit the right strategy on setting up internal systems and external partnerships to be able to meet this ambitious goal of going to scale,” she said. “There are real dilemmas around that.” One of the questions Khoury faces is how to create a space, or a sandbox as she put it, for teams to try out new models. A Devex story on innovation labs included advice from Aleem Walji, who formerly led innovation at the World Bank, calling for a move from an “innovation island” model to an “innovation peninsula” model, so that the initiative can alter the course of an organization at large. Khoury said she is trying to figure out how to create a space where new ideas can grow, while also working within current systems. “We’ve been pushing ourselves hard and we know we have further to go,” she said.