Table 2.

Four characteristics of humanitarian context by innovation type

Innovation type (Francis & Bessant, 2005)	Disaster phase (1)	Actors (2)	Locations (3)	Focus area(4)	Examples from articles
New product	Immediate response	Humanitarian organisations	Field (last-mile)	Relief distribution; Relief items	UAVs/drones (Chowdhury et al., 2017; Haidari et al., 2016; Tatham et al., 2017a); autonomous vehicles (Mosterman et al., 2014); medical maggots (Tatham et al., 2017b); hybrid cargo airships (Tatham et al., 2017c); web-tools for supply–demand matching (Courcol et al., 2021); DSS using opensource imaging (Griffith et al., 2019)
New service	All phases; primarily preparedness and immediate response	Logistic service providers; humanitarian organisations; beneficiaries	All locations; regional; field	Collaboration; relief distribution; pre-positioning	4PL services (Abidi et al., 2015); tracking & tracing (Baldini et al., 2012; Delmonteil & Rancourt, 2017; Ergun et al., 2014; Ozguven & Ozbay, 2013; Ozguven & Ozbay, 2015; Yang et al., 2011; Biswal et al., 2018); inventory pre-positioning (Dufour et al., 2018); web-based service for evacuation (Hadiguna et al., 2014)
New process	All phases; primarily preparedness and immediate response	Beneficiaries; humanitarian organisations; donors	All locations; HQ; field; regional	Relief distribution; inventory management; needs assessment; procurement	GIS for pre-positioning equipment (Chen et al., 2011); public procurement for innovation (Haavisto & Kovács, 2015); management of medical technology transfer (Santos et al., 2016); new funding mechanism for inventory allocation (Natarajan & Swaminatha, 2017); cloud computing for information sharing (Schniederjans et al., 2016); decision making through mobile phones (Serrato-Garcia et al., 2016); information systems and technology implementation management in the field (Tussime & Byrne, 2011; Patil et al., 2021); information gathering through voice-enabled technology (Waidyanatha et al., 2013); application of Industry 4.0 (Dubey et al., 2020; Kumar & Singh, 2022; Zahedi et al., 2021); order facilitation for stressful environments (Barnes et al., 2014); optimisation using social vulnerability (Alem et al., 2021)
New paradigm	All phases	Donors; beneficiaries	Field	Beneficiary; supplier management; donors	Paradigm shift through cash transfer programmes (Abushaikhaa & Schumann-Bölsche, 2016; Heaslip et al., 2018), or 3D printing (He et al., 2021; Tatham et al., 2015); best practice design (Bornstein et al., 2013); sharing economy for relief distribution (Hirschinger et al., 2016; L’Hermitte and Nair, 2021); use of local knowledg0e/capacity in humanitarian logistics (Sheppard et al., 2013; Sodhi & Tang, 2014); multi-sector partnerships to produce relief items (Vinson et al., 2021)