The International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, ‘The Movement’, is the world’s largest humanitarian network. More than 50% of the 14 million active volunteers are youth volunteers. These youth volunteers play vital roles in humanitarian action and development around the world by addressing needs in their communities. To develop the potential of these youth volunteers and enhance their collective impact, The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) launched an IFRC Youth Innovation Academy: Limitless. Limitless offers youth volunteers a theoretical introduction to the design process and financial support for the development of their ideas. Applying for the programme starts with the introduction of a COVID-19 related problem, followed by a number of workshops to guide projects of the youth volunteers.

This thesis examines whether the design of the Limitless program matched its aim of fostering humanitarian innovation, and based on the research conducted it presents a new human-centered curriculum design to foster innovation through a strong focus on problem framing. This bridges the gap between the (currently unanswered) human perspective and the incentive to facilitate innovation from within the IFRC.

From extensive literature and empirical research it can be concluded that the current programme lacks multiple components necessary for successful facilitation of innovation. Foremost, the initial challenges presented by the youth volunteers were often found to be too broad and ill-defined, therefore making it difficult to come up with a solution within the scope of the programme. Resulting from these initial findings, thorough research on how to facilitate innovation was carried out. Based on this a set of design guidelines and barriers for innovation was formulated. These guidelines formed the starting point of the concept design.

The design phase explored how a strategically designed solution can complement the currently missing components of the Limitless programme. An overarching platform is proposed, which aims to stimulate interaction between multiple stakeholders and creates more growth potential for the youth volunteers’ projects. The first module within the action-oriented curriculum presented via the platform emphasizes
problem framing. A deeper dive into theory and practice around this resulted in a novel workshop format for which a back-end flowchart and a front-end digital prototype were developed. The concept was iterated upon multiple times, in order to create a format that best meets the needs of the youth volunteers. Validation with youth volunteers suggests that the novel workshop does indeed improve the ability to create a well-framed problem statement.

This research contributes to the IFRC’s ambition to support young innovators in their innovation journey. It also highlights more generally how humanitarian innovation can be improved and how growth potential can be designed. For future implementation and further development of the curriculum, a selection of recommendations is presented.