How is social innovation emerging in the Danish humanitarian sector?

Humanitarian innovation has been pushed as a governance strategy for collaboration among private businesses and NGOs about humanitarian aid. The innovation push sets a new scene for collaboration about humanitarian aid across NGOs and businesses. This chapter investigates how central actors in the humanitarian ecosystem in Denmark make sense of the push for innovation and how processes of innovation emerge. We explore the challenges and potentials when actors engage in processes of developing humanitarian innovation.

Based on observations obtained at network meetings and follow-up interviews with key NGOs, businesses, and government in the Danish humanitarian sector, we identify major learning points seeking to explain how NGOs critically adopt and sustain new practices of innovation. We contribute by providing a narrative and deeper understanding of how processes innovation occurs as social-value creating practices. NGOs face requests to adopt new and more advanced networked approaches to innovation to attract funding and solve complex humanitarian problems. Building on neo-institutional theory and the construct of strategic reflexivity from the innovation literature, the chapter investigates how central actors of the humanitarian sector in Denmark rely on the two intertwined processes of strategy-making and reflexivity.