2. My background
• NetHope – Emergency Response
Director 2011-2015
• ICE-SAR – Former team leader
Icelandic USARTEAM
• UNDAC – Member since 2005
• Author –The Crisis Leader
• 25+ years in Disaster Management
• 35+ years in ICT
• Trusted advisor to governments in
use of ICT in disaster response
3. Changes observed over the past decade
• Improvements in field based connectivity
• Move away from paper based data collection
• Maps are no longer rough sketch on a piece of paper
• Social media – a tool for awareness building and response
• The rise of digital volunteers
• Humanitarian hackathons
• Increased interest by academia in humanitarian response
4. Challenges observed over the past decade
• Better field based connectivity led to centralization of response
• A myriad of mobile data collection system with no standards in place
• Humanitarian responders don’t know how to ask for actionable maps
• Awareness building through social media eating up bandwidth
• We have no clue how to listen to what affected people are saying on social
media
• Only a handful of response organizations know how to leverage digital
volunteers effectively and digital volunteers still creating datasets that
nobody asked for
• Humanitarian hackathons leave everyone feeling like they did some good,
but very few solutions come out of them.
• Lack of practical academic research in this space.
7. Disruption is happening already
• Explosive growth in mobile
phone ownership
• Resilience of mobile networks
• Social networks
• Occupy movement
• Social entrepreneurship
• Impact Investment
9. Wikinomics (2006)
• With the costs of
communicating dramatically
dropping, firms who do not
change their current structures
will perish.
• Companies who utilize mass
collaboration will dominate
their respective markets.
• We cannot solve the problems
of the information age using
institutions of the industrial age
10. Philanthropy
• A century old mechanism for
sharing your wealth with those
in need
• Non-sustainable model
• Demand grossly out ways the
availability
• High administrative cost
associated with grant writing,
M&E, and fundraising
11. International Humanitarian Response
• Built around the concept of lack
of local capacity to respond
• Built around a top-down
approach to response
• Distribution of material and
resources from donor countries
• Highly political system where
competition is fierce and
collaboration is scarce
• Annual $16B-24B market
12. Change is hard when…
• …your own role/power is affected by it
• …money is involved
• …you have a hard time thinking outside the box
• …bureaucracy is stronger than progress
• …you realize you are an outdated dinosaur fighting to stay in power
• …your idea of innovation simply leads to pilotitis
13. We need to think outside the box
• How do we truly empower affected communities to self-organize?
• How do we leverage digital aid to address most of the need?
• How do we perform needs assessment bottom up, not top down?
• How do we supplement and strengthen local capacity instead of
bulldozing over it?
• How do we harness the passion within companies, movements,
individuals to solve problems?
• How do we move from an unsustainable, non-scalable approaches
towards self-sustainable, replicable, and truly scalable models?
14. New premises to work from
• We will soon be able to restore mobile connectivity in <24 hours
• Large portion of the population worldwide will soon have
smartphones
• Disaster prone countries will continue to build up their own national
capacity to respond
• Over 80% of current aid will become digital in nature – driven by
mobile money becoming available worldwide
• Government and philanthropical funding will reduce in size due to
politics and new ways of thinking by millennial generation
15.
16. Learning from disruption in other fields
• We need to focus on innovation
that leads to disruption
• We need to provide funding
models that are tolerant to
failure
• We need to built an ecosystem
that supports entrepreneurial
thinking in the humanitarian
space
• We need to focus on
sustainable business models
17. This is why I moved to Silicon Valley…
• To learn about disruption in the
hub of innovation
• To build up the networks
required to drive disruption into
the humanitarian space
• To understand how we can
adapt the venture capital model
of financing to humanitarian
response
• To build up an army of
disrupters
18. What have I learned so far…
• EvenVCs are interested in seeing
disruption in this space
• SiliconValley is built on the
concept of giving back
• True innovation comes when you
understand the fundamental
problem that the user needs to
resolve
• Solutions we create for
humanitarian response must have
daily use cases for them to truly be
used in times of need
Coase’s Law – economics – 1960
A firm will tend to expand until the cost of organizing an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction on the open market.
However, because of the changing usage patterns of Internet technologies, the cost of transactions has dropped so significantly that the authors assert that the market is better described by an inversion of Coase's Law. That is:
A firm will tend to expand until the cost of carrying out an extra transaction on the open market become equal to the costs of organizing the same transaction within the firm.