innovation
The Democratization of End User Innovation
Published June 05, 2009 @ 06:49AM PT
Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson wrote an awesome post this morning called "Open Platforms and Innovation," in which he discusses Time magazine's cover story this week about Twitter.
The major take away from the article, in Fred's mind, is a shift in thinking about innovation. While evidence of innovation (or innovation capacity) is usually measured in patents and PhD's, there seems to be a disconnect between those numbers and the sort of consumer innovation that is becoming so seamlessly integrated with the modern internet.
Technology has reached a point where anyone can get involved with innovation. Patents and degrees matter a lot less. Imagining something and then coding it up is what its all about these days.
We are engaged in what Eric von Hippel calls "end user innovation" and it is a fundamental shift in the way society innovates. The Twitter founders are a perfect example. They built a simple tool to share short messages and it has become something entirely different.
Now clearly Fred is focused on the consumer internet, but there is evidence of this thesis all around. My friend Alex at NetSquared posted an awesome interview with Appfrica Founder Jon Gosier. Talking about the genesis for the idea:
So at Barcamp Kampala (or Campala as we called it), about 80 to 100 hungry software developers showed up. They had never done anything like it before. They were mostly students but there were also CEOs, administrators, and leaders from the industry (like Joseph Mucheru from Google East Africa). Unlike most events here, everyone was an equal, it didn't matter if you were a student or millionaire, everyone had equal control. That seemd to really resonate. One of the things the crowd kept mentioning was that there was a lack of mentors and access to capital for software developers. I decided to start Appfrica Labs out of those discussions.
Appfrica just saw the first investment in one of it's developer's companies, Status.ug.
The fascinating thing is that while the tech world has some unique circumstances, it's impact is enabling the democratization of innovation elsewhere, as well. For example, the rural clinics who are beginning to use FrontlineSMS:Medic aren't necessarily hacking the software, but they are building use cases that can be shared across their network and diffuse innovative practical applications.
This is extremely powerful stuff.
Youth Taking Action: A 15 Year Old Invents the Future
Published June 03, 2009 @ 07:22AM PT
At the tender age of 9, Javier Fernández-Han found his calling: design for the other 90 percent - help the world's poor meet their basic needs sustainably.
Several years of research and design have led to an innovative solution: The VERSATILE System - a mashup of new and adapted technology that treats waste, produces methane and bio-oil as fuel, produces food for humans and livestock, sequesters greenhouse gases, and produces oxygen.
What drives this complete energy resource system? Algae - the little organism that could.
For his work, Javier, 15, won the top prize in this year's Invent Your World Challenge, sponsored by Ashoka's Youth Venture and the Lemelson Foundation.
We spoke to Javier about the VERSATILE System and the need for holistic thinking in the invention sector.
1. If your invention - VERSATILE System - is the answer, what is the question?
What system can improve the quality of life in a village by providing the basic necessities of food, sanitation, energy-fuel, and income in an environmentally sustainable and technologically appropriate fashion?
2. So how does VERSATILE System answer the question? What does it do?
The innovative VERSATILE System answers the question by tightly knitting together a dozen existing and new technologies to meet food, sanitation, energy, income and environmental needs (in a way that's affordable to the world's 90% of the world).
At the heart of this efficient system - the secret ingredient - is algae... salt-water loving algae powered by the sun.
Elegant interconnectedness makes the VERSATILE system unique. Waste from one part of system is nourishment for another, making the system extremely efficient. The VERSATILE system consists of six subsystems:
- Anaerobic digester (AD) - converts food scraps and sewage into "clean" products
- Bio-gas upgrader - takes harmful gases from digester and treats them, turns them into fuel and nourishment for algae
- Vented methane burning stoves - burns methane without polluting, resulting carbon dioxide is captured
- Algae bioreactors - use sunlight, saltwater, carbon dioxide and nutrients from digester to produce oxygen and algae biomass, which can be used as food for livestock and people
- Flush latrines
- PlayPump - turns human energy (from children playing) into stored energy that can be used to power VERSATILE system and other electronic devices
Click on presentation for details of the system.
The VERSATILE system is also a source of income. Algae biomass can be processed into livestock and aquaculture feed, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products (DHA, omega-3s, etc). Extra methane and algae oil (SVO) produced by the AD can be stored and sold as fuel or to a refinery for processing. Finally, carbon credits can be sold to factories.
All parts of the VERSATILE system are modular. This allows the system to be highly customized to meet the needs of the owner(s).
3. Most inventions aim to do one thing well. You chose to multitask. Why is it important to link the different processes into one system?
By interconnecting the 12 technologies in the 6 subsystems the VERSATILE system provides a complete solution in a practically waste free manner. As much as possible, waste created by one part is used as nourishment and fuel for another. An invention that is narrowly focused on solving a single problem often inadvertently creates more problems because nature is highly complex and interconnected.
A single invention rarely solves an entire problem. Often we only see a small part of a larger problem without seeing the connections between the many parts. If we focus on only one small part of a complex interconnected system we may not understand the full extent of our impact on the rest of the system.
4. What does this type of holistic thinking mean for today's inventors?
Holistic thinking means that today's inventor's need to think broadly about the problems they attempt to solve. Technology is often only a small part of an entire solution. To fully address an issue, inventors need to also consider cultural, religious, political, economic and environmental implications.
For example, there is a village named Djenne in the African country of Chad. Not long ago Djenne had no running water. A group of engineers learned about the village's lack of running water and installed an entire system that provided the homes with running water. At first, the project seemed like a complete success. Then the project became an environmental and sanitation disaster. The problem was that the village had no sewage system. When there was no running water, each family's sewage and dirty water was simply collected in a bucket which was emptied at the end of each day. But when water became readily available, the villagers began using much more of it and quickly overwhelmed their bucket system of sewage removal. As a result, dangerous open sewage flowed into the streets and caused a major sanitation hazard.
5. If we were to set up VERSATILE System in an African or Indian village tomorrow, what changes are we likely to see in the village in a year's time?
- Less coughing due to drastic reduction of air pollution thanks to replacement of wood burning stoves with cleaner burning stoves that use methane. Villagers enjoy better health.
- Less time spent foraging for wood as fuel thanks to methane produced by VERSATILE. Children have more time available for studying because they don't need to forage for wood as fuel. Children gain education.
- Electricity generated by Playpump powers LED lights at night, allowing people to work and read at night. Villagers can be more productive.
- A medical diagnostics company has shown interest in buying bulk algae-biomass from the village for processing into pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products (e.g. Phycobiliproteins which have market value of up to $10,000 per kg).
- More villagers can afford to raise goats, pigs, and fish due to availability of algae as livestock and fish feed. Villagers enjoy better nutrition and gain income from sale of livestock.
- Villagers no longer have to buy tanks of methane or propane for use in lighting, heating, and cooking thanks to the methane produced by VERSATILE. Villagers sell excess methane for income.
- Villagers use the algae oil produced by VERSATILE to power a variety of labor-saving machines (flour mill, corn husker, water pump, etc.) that can use straight vegetable oil (SVO) as fuel. Villagers sell excess SVO for income.
- Villagers negotiating to sell carbon credits due to VERSATILE's greenhouse gas sequestering capabilities.
6. Do you foresee your invention/innovation being scaled up to serve larger communities or cities, what might that look like?
Due to the VERSATILE system's innovative modular design, it can easily be scaled up or down to serve communities with populations ranging anywhere from 100 to 200,000+ people. A village simply adds additional modules as their population grows. Another benefit of having a modular system is that a village can build or buy the stock VERSATILE system and add extra components one at a time as they can afford them. This way, they do not have to buy an entire new system at once or obtain a costly high interest loan.
The VERSATILE system can also be installed nearly anywhere with a warm climate, including deserts irrigated by saltwater, and even in submarines and cruise ships. All that you might have to change is the algae. There are literally thousands of algae strains - some are better suited for certain conditions and functions than others.
The VERSATILE system can also be scaled down in size. I am currently developing a family-sized VERSATILE system for developed countries. It is the same concept as the VERSATILE system 2.0, just scaled down to fit the size limitations of a small house or apartment and with an estimated cost of $300.
We are at the dawn of the algae era.
I envision my grandchildren asking me in amazement one day as we tour the Boston Museum of Science:
"Granddad, was there really a time when the versatility of algae was not harnessed but rather algae was treated as pond-scum... a nuisance?"
Get to know other young social entrepreneurs by reading their stories and seeing videos of them in action at http://genvcampaigns.org/
If you are a young person between the ages of 12-20 and want to create positive change in your community join the global movement of young changemakers at http://genv.net/
All At Once Entrepreneurship In China
Published June 02, 2009 @ 10:08AM PT
A string of recent books, from Fareed Zakaria's "The Post-American World" to National University of Singapore professor Kishore Mahbubani's "The New Asian Hemisphere," have argued that there is, in Mahbubani's words, an irresistible shift of power to the East. These works argue that the increasing economic and political strength of Asian countries is a force that the US should embrace, as it's not about a fall of the West but a "rise of the rest" so to speak. They also argue that whether we like it or not, these forces are here to stay. Yet these works also tend not to locate the nexus of economic growth in entrepreneurship. It's fascinating to see a few articles in the last week, then, about the emergence of entrepreneurship (including social entrepreneurship) in China. Tech journalist Sarah Lacy wrote a post on TechCrunch yesterday called "Why China Isn't the Next Silicon Valley." Her point was basically that there is something uniquely different about the all at once nature of China's growth.
What makes China so staggering is that everything that happened to corporate America over decades—think the television and media studios build out of the 1950s, the greed of the 1980s, the dot com bubble, the build out of physical and IT infrastructure, current Web 2.0 and CleanTech innovation—is all happening to China at once.
Imagine: At the same time eCommerce is getting sea legs, TV Home Shopping is also getting hot. Online ads are growing not because people are TiVoing through commercials—both TV and online ads are growth markets at the same time. Ditto for entertainment and piracy: While Hollywood sees the Internet as a threat to its cozy legacy business, China’s entertainment industry is just now building amid a world where piracy is already rampant. No one assumes anyone will buy a CD, so they just look for other ways to make money. The wonder of China right now isn’t just the size of the market. It’s the rate at which dozens of “old” and “new” economies are all maturing amid one another, and the hyper-network effects that such economic progress is having throughout the country.
As for China’s start-up ecosystem , it’s working to build its own Valley-like infrastructure, but it doesn’t have the luxury of growing it steadily over several decades. Experts say there’s at least $20 billion in venture capital sloshing around the country right now. It’s probably double that if you count angels and unofficial or very local funds, says Rocky Lee
of DLA Piper, a law firm that represents much of that venture money in China.
That’s why calling China merely “the next Silicon Valley” misses the singularity of what’s happening there. The Valley has never been like this, and I don’t say that to knock the Valley. In many ways, our steady development has been healthier. But it’s also a lot less electric. In the next ten years or so way more money will be lost amid the China chaos, but I’m betting way more money will be made too.
It's not just new economies that are being created, however. A few weeks ago, a delegation of Chinese leaders representing the government, media, and the private sector gathered in Beaverton, Oregon for a 9 day "Social Innovation Leaders Program" in order to learn about how US companies and other private actors work actively to create social good. From a story in the Seattle Times
:
Wu Qungang, a young government official from China, came to Oregon this month for an unusual nine days of study about social innovation in a capitalist country. He learned how Nike funds youth athletics and Starbucks gives grants for community projects and heard about a host of other ways that business and philanthropy can be harnessed to make life better.
Then Wu asked a question: What about the shareholders and the bottom line — all this giving reduces profits. "What can the corporation do to convince the shareholders to continue all of this social responsibility?"
Wu's comments reflect the debate brewing among a generation of Chinese who came of age amid a juggernaut of entrepreneurial growth that made some in their nation rich while expanding the gap with those who remain poor.
They see a need for more philanthropy and more public-private partnerships to tackle the social, economic and environmental problems of 21st-century China.
Root Cause founder (and peer social innovation blogger) Andrew Wolk wrote a piece reflecting that the world is at an inflection point. In "China's Opportuntiy for Social and Public Innovation" he wrote:
As I reflected on the time I spent with these participants, it occurred to me that China, because of its recent adoption of capitalism, has a particularly interesting opportunity to advance social innovation. It was only 30 years ago that China began to explore free markets, and yet the country is already seeing market failures along with the vast opportunities to advance social innovation that come with those failures...The leadership of the All-China Youth Federation got it, recognizing that it would take all three sectors to tackle issues of poverty, the environment and other society-wide challenges that will become even more pronounced as their economy continues to grow.
It's easy to forget how powerful youth is. For each of the last two years, the Global Engagement Summit has welcomed undergraduate members of the Chinese Youth Social Entrepreneurship Network to Chicago. New websites like Responsible China are keeping track of social responsibility and innovation among Chinese companies. Young Chinese leaders have (and are clearly taking) the opportunity to design their capitalism, and it seems to me to be worth investment and support to help social innovation and entrepreneurialism take root at the heart of their vision.
Image Credit: "Traffic (Are You Ready?)" by SmokingPermitted
Better World Books to Offer Equity to Non-Profit Partners
Published May 26, 2009 @ 12:19PM PT
Studying in Gorée, near Dakar, Senegal (via Ferdinand Reus)
When people new to the field ask me what organization most embodies "social enterprise" or "social entrepreneurship," more often than not I find myself describing Better World Books.
Better World Books takes donated books that would otherwise end up in landfills, resells them through it's online marketplace, turns a great profit and pours money back into literacy programs around the world. They're already one of the most socially-integrated companies around; the first thing you see when you arrive on their website is the convenience of their product, the amount they've donated to literacy, and the number of books they've saved from landfills.
Today, they've made an announcement that suggests a bold new future of non-profit/for-profit partnerships. They've begun to offer an actually ownership stake in their company to their non-profit partners.
From the press release:
"Today Better World Books announced the creation of an Incentive Stock Option program for its non-profit literacy partners, an unprecedented financial innovation in social entrepreneurship. The program puts aside approximately 5% of the company for use in stock option grants to an initial group of five literacy partners with potential to add others in the future: Books for Africa, Room to Read, Worldfund, the Robinson Community Learning Center and the National Center for Family Literacy.
In keeping with the company's core values, Better World Books is implementing this program to ensure its literacy partners can share in its financial success. Working alongside its primary equity investor, Good Capital, the company carved out a 5% ownership stake for its key literacy partners.
"We worked closely with Good Capital to come up with a way to more closely link our social mission to our business model, ensuring the future success of Better World Books results in benefits to our non-profit literacy partners," said Better World Books CEO, David Murphy.
"We created Better World Books to show that it is possible to do good while at the same time run a successful company. Our literacy partners are essential to our mission, and we want them to flourish," said Better World Books co-founder Xavier Helgesen. "Today's announcement ensures that as our company grows, our partners will too."
Better World Books plans to supplement the initial round of stock options with subsequent rounds of performance based options, which reward its literacy partners for their successes in promoting and supporting literacy; for the synergies they create with Better World Books; and for their innovativeness in addressing literacy and education challenges in the United States and around the world. These stock option grants will be based upon the partners' ability to achieve their own internal metrics for delivering on specified goals and objectives as well as how effectively they promote the collection and sales of books collected in book drives that provide Better World Books with its inventory.
"One key to our approach in social entrepreneurship is establishing clear, quantifiable benchmarks for success for our partners-and rewarding them when they meet or exceed those goals," said Murphy.
Hopefully I'll have a chance to get more about this up in the coming weeks, but I think this is a huge milestone. Kudos to the BWB team and to their partners at Good Capital as well for pushing this field.
TED Announces Fellows for TEDGlobal 2009
Published May 26, 2009 @ 08:09AM PT
TEDGlobal 2009: The Substance of Things Not Seen
For the uninitiated, TED is one of the greatest modern gatherings of thinkers, doers, and general polymaths. Their 20-minute TED talks, framed to presenters as the "speech of their lives" have produced some of the most brilliant nuggets of wit and inspiration this side of YouTube. The TED Fellows program gives creative innovators from around the world the chance to attend, cost free, one of the world-reknown TED conferences.
Today, TED announced its first class of TEDGlobal fellows, each of whom will join speakers like The Second World author Parag Khanna, musician Imogen Heap, and child-soldier-turned-rapper Emmanual Jal at the TEDGlobal program in Oxford in July. I was thrilled to see a few familiar names on the list:
"Jonathan Gosier (US/Uganda) — Founder, Appfrica, an organization nurturing and investing in East African software startups...
Peter Haas (US/Haiti/Guatemala) — Founder, Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, bringing appropriate technology to the developing world; tinkerer...
William Kamkwamba (Malawi/South Africa) — Inventor; student, African Leadership Academy"
As regular readers know, I think Jon's model of African entrepreneurship incubation is a little glimpse of the future and the smart money should be betting on him. Peter Haas' model of supporting community driven appropriate technology has been an inspiration for young changemakers since he founded the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group a few years ago. He served as one of the earliest keynotes of the Global Engagement Summit that got me started in this crazy world. William I haven't yet met, but along with so many others, I've been inspired and touched by his story of ingenuity and inspiration.
Embedded Philanthropy, URL Shorteners for Good, and Maximizing Meaning
Published May 19, 2009 @ 02:42PM PT
With the rise of Twitter and other micro-messaging platforms, there is a booming industry around URL shorteners. These little tools like bit.ly, tinyurl.com, and is.gd take your long link and turn it into a fraction of the characters so as to more easily fit within the 140 character limit.
Today I ran across Good.ly, a URL shorten that donates a portion of the referral fees it receives from product purchases to charter. Basically it works like this. You see some awesome kicks on Zappos. You Tweet, "Omg totally buying these awesome 80%20's! http:good.ly/65fh5." One of your followers clicks on it, is brought to the Zappos page, and then buys the shoes. Assuming that Zappos has a referral program set up (which I actually don't know if they do?), Good.ly gets a small fee for "referring" the sale to them. Good.ly then donates %55 of this fee to one of a growing number of charities.
This is an example of what Peter Deitz and the folks at Social Actions might call "embedded philanthropy." The idea of embedded philanthropy is that different companies, like Good.ly, are embedding a philanthropic component into a huge array of our day-to-day commercial transactions. In some ways, it's like moving a piece of corporate social responsibility to the user side, and making it a part of the commercial relationship between the company and it's client (or user, for the case of online products).
I don't think that this sort of embedded philanthropy is going to in any way diminish more "traditional" forms of philanthropic action. I think it's power is that it reflects a growing desire I think we're experiencing to integrate our values with our commercial and career desicions. We're increasingly all about maximizing value and meaning - both the value and meaning we derive from the array of our experiences and the value and meaning we contribute to communities and causes we care about.
It seems to me that these embedded philanthropic tools are on the front part of that shifting curve, and seem to be a good place to experimenting with ideas and capital.
This blog post is part of the Embedded Philanthropy Blog Series, sponsored by Telecom for Charity. The blog series was launched in May 2009 to highlight expert thinking and encourage discussions on the state of embedded philanthropy in today's economy.
Innovation at the Intersection of Scarcity and Abundance
Published May 17, 2009 @ 10:54AM PT
(via Flickr)
Is scarcity driving innovation, or a dampening force?
In a Friday column on his FastCompany Design4Impact blog, frog design lead Robert Fabricant advanced an argument that our conception of innovation is changing. Whereas we once saw innovation as the result of having access to cutting edge technology, Fabricant points out that major multinational corporations like Nokia are now looking closer to ground level for new ideas.
Part of this move is a larger shift in the relationship between businesses and their customers, but it also may be, in Fabricant's mind, a product of particular combination of forces:
...it is worth considering what happens when the two conditions meet, as is increasingly the case--when a culture dominated by resources scarcity is confronted with an abundance of different resources (mobile networks and social capital).
After all, "scarcity" is no longer synonymous with poverty. True scarcity exists in very remote, rural regions of the world. But poverty is more often characterized these days by dense urban slums. Areas where there is an abundance of social resources, marketplaces and a growing abundance of information and media as well.
What we are seeing more and more is the collision of scarcity and abundance (which was the topic of last year's Pop!Tech conference, for those lucky enough to attend). We are increasingly confronted with images of street kids in India saving up the few rupees they can scrounge from scavenging scrap metal to play video games or buy minutes for their mobile phones. As urban slums become the defining human condition, you will see an acceleration of innovation. Density and connectivity are the big game changers that will drive innovation for generations to come. Not scarcity.
This dialogue - between companies and communities and between immediate need and aspiration is what makes it so exciting to work in emerging markets. I think that Fabricant is absolutely right to identify "density and connectivity," as the driving factors of innovation moving forward.
The social tools we're experimenting with now are increasingly focusing on augmenting and accelerating collaboration and resource discovery within offline communities, and local entrepreneurs are at the forfront of the local customization which can really unleash that power. Answerbird.com, one of the first products launched by Jon Gosier's Appfrica Labs is a case in point. It builts off of the Facebook platform to make it easier for Kampala, Uganda's 60,000+ Facebook users to ask and recieve essential information from one another.
I continue to think that this sort of innovation and experimentation has more financial and social potential than just about anything out there.
