Field Ready’s Journey to Scale – what have they achieved? Vlog #5

At Field Ready, we manufacture humanitarian supplies in the field, making useful items where they are needed to solve problems locally. We make things ourselves but also pass on these skills to others through training and capacity-building.

Field Ready is different because we focus on enabling local manufacturing to meet humanitarian need. This means benefits for the local economy, and reductions in cost and delivery times for lifesaving humanitarian supplies.

The impact of this is dramatically improved efficiency making aid faster, cheaper and better.

Working with Elrha’s Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF) over the past few years has allowed us to finalise and implement our impact and business model, meaning that the work we do is targeted to having the most positive impact for disaster-affected communities.

We aim at nothing less than the transformation of humanitarian supply chains by making supplies locally, where they are needed. We have tried to do this by ‘scaling up’ our operations in the near term (more deployments, designs and training) and growing field manufacturing capabilities by ‘scaling out’ toward our long-term goals (systematising our innovations, major partnerships and sharing learning).

Key tangible products Field Ready expected to generate during the course of the HIF funding period were:

1. Scale up to sustain innovation:

• 10 new deployments – we actually deployed to 20 countries, with continuing operations in 10 locations.
• 200+ new designs – we worked on 350+ designs and added over 100 to our central catalogue.
• Six additional manufacturing techniques – we worked with over a dozen techniques and developed projects using eight new techniques including roto-moulding of plastics, 3D printing, laser-cutting and other digital manufacturing techniques.
• 1000+ people trained using Elrha’s Humanitarian Innovation Fund materials – we trained 1,424 people in digital manufacturing, human centred design and Field Ready’s needs assessment methodologies.

2. Scale out capabilities for impact:

• Reach one agreement with a large humanitarian agency or donor – Field Ready has been very successful in developing meaningful partnerships around the world, most notably as part of the $50m Australian government’s ‘Australian Humanitarian Partnership’ programme.
• Gather more evidence on innovation from M&E – We’ve learned so much about the impact of what we’ve been doing and we’re sharing our experience with partners around the world to inform their approaches too.
• Develop a roadmap and scaling plan for years to come – With Elrha’s help we’ve developed sustainability and growth strategies that are starting to bear fruit.
• Produce 30+ reports and documents – We’ve spread the message with 70+ media articles in places like Huffington Post and The Guardian and even published a book on Managing Humanitarian Innovation.

We are grateful for everything Elrha has done to support our innovation and its effects on the world.

We’ve saved lives, made aid better and helped the humanitarian sector think and act differently.

Now we’re looking to further spread the message of local manufacturing and scale our innovations for the benefit of people affected by disasters around the world.

Watch a wrap-up video of the project so far and their latest vlog focusing on their journey to manufacture and scale up heavy lifting airbags: