In humanitarian response, the stakes are literally life and death, and the fear of failure is palpable. While the aid community’s dedication to social good is admirable, risk aversion in conflict and disaster response has led to an endless cycle of elaborate, unfocused, long-term interventions that are meandering, ineffective and often collapse under their own weight.

Over the past decade the startup community has shown us a new way to innovate. Technology entrepreneurs use design thinking and rapid prototyping to create novel products and platforms with limited resources. It’s time for this lean, efficient, “fail fast” approach to disrupt humanitarian programming just like it’s revolutionized software development.

In this session we’ll look at a new paradigm for crisis response, using human-centered design, lean startup ideas, and agile project planning to fail —- for good.