Innovation and Futures
IFRC’s Global Innovation Team promotes and develops strategies and tactics aimed at transforming business as usual. Our team works to localize a range of innovation and futures approaches ensuring that organizations and programs remain agile while cultivating an anticipatory mindset to meet the needs of vulnerable communities.
What We Do
Futures and Foresight
The Solferino Academy is a think tank and ‘do’ tank – that undertakes horizon scanning, trends analysis and futures exploration to help the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement understand the future of vulnerability and risk and to develop strategies to enable change.
Innovative Finance
The global innovative finance team aims to unlock private capital and help further leverage public funding to mobilize various new sources of investment for public policy, social services and development goals, while at the same time realigning interests of various partners and creating new investment opportunities.
Local Innovation
The hype of technology has quieted initiatives driven by local people in local contexts. Therefore, we help Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies to surface their own local innovations and to find others in their communities and how to better support them.
Culture and capacity
Our single greatest asset is our people. In National Societies all around the world, we have talented individuals who are creative, entrepreneurial and who are trying innovative approaches in their work. We work closely with staff and volunteers sharing methods to foster a culture of experimentation within the network.
Inspiring Stories
Red Cross aims to sponsor first pure volcano cat bond
Read the original story by ARTEMIS International humanitarian movement the Red Cross is looking to the capital markets and the potential issuance of a parametric catastrophe bond to protect against volcanic risks, according to Adam Bornstein. Adam...
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Moving from paper-based workflows to real-time health data management
Moving from paper-based workflows to real-time health data management Kenya Red Cross and Danish Red Cross came together to pilot digital health technologies in an attempt to tackle complex health issues in Kenya. They partnered with Unumed, a private...
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Gamified brainstorming for solving daily challenges
Spanish Red Cross is cooking a new project aiming to bring creative ideas to life collectively. 'Innovation Open Line' will be a digital space for staff and volunteers to propose innovative initiatives to solve their challenges. The platform will have a gamified...
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Mastering Skills Using Alien Technology?
The aliens have invaded Europe and youth is last hope! Youth will kick the aliens out while developing personal skills through exciting missions. EuropAlien is a cooperative strategy game created in the context of Play4Change project and supported by Erasmus+ Youth in...
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Innovation Events Across the Red Cross Red Crescent Network
You may not have heard much about them yet, but you will see a lot of them this year. National Societies are investing more in bringing together staff, volunteers, and external experts in the innovation to explore new approaches to humanitarian work. From emerging...
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IFRC 2017, An Innovation Story
1. Thriving in a complex world The level of change unfolding in the world today is extraordinary. It is widely recognized that current humanitarian systems and processes are already stretched beyond capacity and will likely face additional stress in the years...
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EXPERIENTIAL FUTURES EXHIBITION
A virtual visit to speculative artefacts from 2030.
INNOVATION WORK IN PROGRESS 2017
IFRC 2017, an innovation story is an interactive report that explains what we were up to last year and some forecasts for 2018.
WHATFUTURES
An online game played by 4000 youth volunteers.
