Digital technologies for inclusive innovations in humanitarian response

Abstract

This article examines the role digital technologies play in facilitating inclusive innovation processes. The empirical focus is on a group of humanitarian organizations that innovated to respond to the Venezuelan refugee crisis in Colombia between 2020 and 2022. The data sources include interviews with service actors, field observations, and reports to donors. The information was analyzed using a service ecosystem approach to identify how actors interacted with digital technologies to find new ways to co-create value. The findings indicate that digital technologies enhanced inclusive innovation processes through different mechanisms, facilitating a dialogical innovation process between NPOs and refugees. These mechanisms include managing information gathering, enhancing data quantity and quality, providing transparency in analysis, transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, and providing an ongoing flow of information. The article concludes by discussing how findings expand the current theory on inclusive innovation and their implications for policy and practice.