Challenges for Social Innovation

Globalization has shortened the distance among cultures and sets of beliefs, enabling some values to influence and prevail over others. A wide acceptance and application of market based principles around the world has changed the way in which people think, turning community values into individual beliefs. This era could be seen as a modern Renaissance in which the individual is the central piece of the puzzle and in which a new reality is being human-centered designed. As this individualization phenomenon expands, the definition of “what people need” has disintegrated, in a literal sense, into the needs of smaller units: a country, a community or even an individual. Hence, as demand has sophisticated, innovations in every level and dimension of supply have been exerted in order to respond to a more complex reality.

In this sense, new institutions have surged to norm, regulate and set a framework for action of firms, governments and civil societies trying to supply an increasingly complex demand. In the near future, the greatest challenge social innovation will experience will be related to institutional change. As Samuel Huntington says, the survival of an institution depends on its ability to adapt to a changing reality.

Therefore, ties among private, social and public sectors will have to strengthen to improve and increase the information flow. If governments do not assume their co-responsibility on social innovation and development by legislating and creating a favorable environment for that can norm new forms of social enterprises, there will be a bottleneck, entrepreneurs will be discouraged and many social needs that cannot be met by the government won’t be met by other actors either.

Also, the survival of traditional non-profit organizations will most likely be put at risk. As new and more institutions are created, the sources of funding will be more limited for existing non-profits. Consequently, they will have to increase their fundraising efforts or revaluate their business models. In addition, innovators should focus in developing new ways for reducing transactions costs derived between non-profits and donors, and between entrepreneurs and investors.

Moreover, another challenge for social innovation will occur inside the firms, which are discovering new frontiers in the base of the pyramid. In the near future, corporative ethics and corporative social responsibility will take a central role and will possibly make many enterprises to question the balance between their profit-maximization principles and their social impact concerns.

The future is uncertain, but nature is wise. So, only the fittest will survive this major changes driven by social innovation. Then, the question that arises is which institutions will be the fittest to survive? Which new business models and institution will be created? The limit is set by individual imagination.  

Can we believe in the human cornucopia of infinite innovation?

Since the earliest times of our economy we have depended on innovation to bring us the things we need. Our inventions have moved mountains and let us soar through the sky and our collective futures look bleak without trust in our power of invention, but innovation has much harder to muster. True innovation overcomes the cultural, physical and emotional barriers which separate so many of humans. "First world problems" are so significantly different than what happens in the rest of the world that we have made it a comical reference:


"I have an itch on my foot... but it tickles when I scratch it" FWP


So we see a vast difference in the entire way of thinking between our world cultures. There is a deep difference from the way we approach and identify problems. That is why the people who look to inspire the greatest and deepest change get to know these cultural differences intimately before trying to bring about change. Levitt Capital Management is an investing firm which tries to bring something deep and powerful to third world communities through his investment. Levitt mentions a television show where some American paramedics went to Pakistan and gave their services to Parkistani's and said that they did more for American-Pakistan relations than any government agency. In the same video he discusses the deep cultural difference which he tries to overcome when investing in other countries. These practices are the types of innovation in the financial market which can overcome our vast cultural differences and physical distances.

While our innovations for change around the world might not be seen as a bottom-up operation there are so many ways in which our innovation comes from the spirit of innovation. Innovation and entrepreneurship have a cultural spirit which ebbs and flows by the demand and cultivation brought about in our society. For America, I believe there is a great force of youth who drive this spirit today. Our need for developing change isn't as much in America now-in-days though. We need to find a way to spread entrepreneurship to the people of the world, to help cultivate innovative ideas in places where we wouldn't be the angels of prosperity bringing them opportunity but where we engaged in the communities which showed promise for innovation, promise for a culture of idea development. While I respect the role Kiva has played in bringing opportunity to small businesses. I believe we should be educating people around the world and offering a way to truly inspire innovation from the people who have the need for these things. The perfect program for inspiring a culture of innovation might not exist because it is impossible to simply create this. But we are growing a mainstream of mavericks in our culture and I believe we can spread our culture of innovation more than we had spread out culture of fast food and democratic politics. Becoming an entrepeneur is harder than reading a guide or taking a class. But we must innovate to bring prosperity to the world. Will we run out spirit? Will our infinite cornucopia of ideas and innovations fall from our expectations? And a harder question, is it only a special few who get to innovate in a worldwide pyramid of resources?

The future is not so safe. The intersection of policy and innovation

With this week's theme of the future of social innovation, I want to address the future concerns of innovating in an undefined space. 3D printing is being recognized as one of the prevailing technologies of this decade, and maybe century. With the ability to construct virtually any consumer product in ones basement will inevitably disrupt the manufacturing industry. Furthermore, 3D printing brings the ability for consumers to innovate in their garage, and become inventors of the next big thing.
A recent Economist article titled "Solid Print: Making things with 3D printing changes the rules of manufacturing," discusses how 3D printing is quickly being adopted in the household. The article goes on to state:

http://www.economist.com/node/21552892

"The new range is not just about printing things, says Abe Reichental, 3D Systems' chief executive. It is also about simplifying the process of making products and letting people use the power of the web to share ideas."

The future of 3D printing, however, has its consequences. After reading an article in the NY Times titled "Disruptions: With a 3-D Printer, Building a Gun With the Push of a Button," highlights how 3D printing of guns is already occurring.  Individuals are easily able to download the renderings of a lethal handgun and replicate it in the comforts of their home.  Furthermore, these guns are not registered and ammunition can be obtained over the internet without a license.  With over 30,000 deaths annually as a result of guns in the United States alone, this poses a substantial policy problem. How should policymakers decide to regulate innovative technologies with regards to 3D printers has yet to be understood. Here is an astonishing quote from the article: 

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/with-a-3-d-printer-building-a-gun-at-home/

"Given the number of existing loopholes and the ease with which people can buy firearms on the Internet, people printing guns might seem like adding a drop of water to an Olympic-size swimming pool. According to an annual report released by the A.T.F., more than 5.5 million guns are made in the United States each year, and millions more are imported."

By utilizing plastic found in lego pieces, individuals are able to manufacture parts to a gun, and legally purchase other gun accessories online.  The good news is that current technology makes it difficult to manufacture plastic strong enough to withstand the firepower of a handgun or rifle. However, it is only a matter of time before technology can keep up with this demand.  

The National Rifle Association has yet to comment on the 3D printing of weapons, but it is an issue that will need to be addressed in the near future.  It is in their best interest to protect the second amendment, but how many more people need to die through illegally purchased firearms before policy reform?

Another article I came across yesterday discusses this very issue. "Will the Guys with the [Printed] Guns Make the Rules" discusses how a University of Texas Law Student, Cody Wilson, freely distributed plans of how to manufacture a 3D gun on regular 3D printers. Here is a picture of Cody with his 3D printed AK-47:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-horwitz/will-the-guys-with-the-pr_b_1953692.html

If Cody Wilson gets his way, it will be easy for any person to print their own deadly weapon in the comfort of their home, without anyone knowing about it. Policy needs to be changed immediately so that this catastrophe does not happen.

Achieving Social Innovative Policy

Just like individuals can address social problems through social ventures, the government itself can become a catalyst of innovative policy to bring change. While it is more common to hear about social innovations, innovative public policy is harder to come by. Many social enterprises try to deal as little as possible with the government when selling a product to meet social needs while one has to always deal with the government to pass innovative public policy.  But just like there are ways to incentivize social entrepreneurship, there are also ways to incentivize innovation within branches dealing with public policy.  

New ways to address problems using policy can result in dramatic changes for the public. The conditional cash transfer program had significant results reducing poverty in Brazil and Mexico. It is sometimes harder for social enterprises to succeed at alleviating a social problem than for a government to address the problem through innovative means. A government often has more resources and capabilities than a social venture. Governments are often slow or incompetent to address certain social problems, but there are ways to bring innovation into a government.

In the article “How Social Innovation is Helping Homeless Veterans,” Ron Ashkenas describes how an innovation approach by public administrators resulted in a dramatic improvement to address chronic homelessness among veterans. Ashkenas’ article led me to believe that we could facilitate innovative public policy by:

• ·      Creating a sense or urgency for the social problem
• ·      Bringing together a diverse group of passionate leaders to address the problem
• ·      Establishing a supportive environment for innovation

Whichever social problem we are addressing, we have to make it a priority among public officials. In the article, US Veteran Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki made sure that institutions and agencies dealing with veterans were aware of the high rate of homelessness among veterans. He raised the issue and brought people and organizations together to address homelessness among veterans.

In the article, Rapid Results Institute organized a boot camp with teams from 4-5 cities to house homeless veterans. Members of teams included case managers and program managers from organizations like the Public Housing Authority, local VA offices and local NGOs. The team only had 100 days to address the problem and then their strategy was implemented and improved. Bringing in people that care about the same problem is beneficial because they not only bring in different ideas, but can also bring in different resources.  

Innovative public policy can have a bottoms-up approach. We often like to think that the national government needs to address all our problems. People often target the national government to bring change and neglect to act locally. But we can start locally by creating a grassroots movement to address a social problem. It is sometimes easier to have a narrower target. We need to get people to be more politically involved and create a supportive environment. We need to get communities excited and passionate about social innovation. And we can start locally and expand. Many social enterprises will at some point have to rely in government to expand and grow; this can be eased if we create a grassroots movement for social innovation. As individuals, we can promote social innovation within government. 

Are Scalability and Sustainability a Trade-off?

I came across this ted talk “India’s Hidden Hotbeds of Invention” by Anil Gupta this week.  this is not a new one but a very interesting talk showing how indigenous entrepreneurs could change people’s life. I feel that this is exactly the idea social innovation starts with. Trust the power of local people. As Anil said, minds on the margin are not marginal minds. I agreed. Inventions happen in the field, in everyday needs, not necessarily happen in the well-equipped labs in prestigious research institutions.  

Anil mentions one thing that particularly catches my attention and I actually paused and thought.  “higher the local fit, greater the chances of scaling up” and also on the slide he presented: Should scale be the enemy of the sustainability? Logic of the Long Tail, investing in ideas, technologies with limited diffusion, without the sustainability is threatened.  Wait, this runs counter to my common sense. Does scalability equal standardization in a certain sense? While it is true that the more local fit the more sustainable a project will be. So I kind of feel that scale and sustainability are trade-offs here. I recalled a certain report stating the fact that many small local NGOs can not get funding for their project because they are too rooted in the local community and could not scale up. So is Anil wrong?

I searched more on the concept of Scalability and found this article: What Do We Lose with Scale? published on the website of center for social innovation in Stanford Business school. The author thinks that there are trade-offs between scale and comprehensive locally driven solutions.  He testified the report I read before:  he has personally witnessed many funders dismiss some highly efficient solutions simply because they are not scalable to replicate or expand. Investors’ considerations are legitimate and understandable, given the limited resources they have.   They hope to find the solution that is effective locally and more importantly they want to reach more customers, buyers with few alternations, which is more financially efficiently.

I think a very critical thing here is the way we define and evaluate “scalability”. When we look at the project to judge whether it can be scalable or not, we should pay more attention to the inherent idea and the multiple approaches it uses. Maybe they are more transferrable and replicable.  However, I still have many questions:

Can the local community be better served with local community efforts and initiatives or outside problem-solver with their “scalable” solutions?  

How can we help those highly community-relevant projects alive? Should government do something in this field?

In real world, how can we measure scalability? 

Innovations in Mobile Technology for Health

It was during a Skype call that Sangu Delle, an impact investor and African entrepreneur, told us:  "Just two days ago, Ghana reached a 98% mobile penetration rate". Mr. Delle is a large scale kind of guy. His current dream is for his company to become a pan-African provider of healthcare services . . . "the UPMC of West Africa."

The on-campus non-profit I am directing with Nate Jayappa called the Student Consulting International Organization, is currently working with Mr. Delle on an M&A acquisition in Ghana of a range of private hospitals. Now, while there is room for high profit margins and deep market penetration in Ghana's urban areas, hospital facilities in Ghana's rural regions are underperforming.

SCIO's executives and associates are starting to brainstorm creative ways to get health to rural Ghanaians. Though a partnership already exists with Emboka Health Ltd. to provide video-conference diagnostics services, telemedicine (healthcare using mobile phones) is an interesting and revolutionary future option for a place like Ghana.

This past September, the global telemedicine market reached $2.5 Billion. At its core, telemedicine is a way to extend clinical services to make them part of lifestyle consultation. The growth of cheap mobile and smartphone devices, combined with the expansion in access and connectivity, is predicted to enable productivity and efficiency gains and greatly reduce the overall costs of healthcare. This is an issue that is contemporary both for the US (which is currently experiencing mushrooming healthcare costs) and for developing regions (which are much better off with a $3,000 thermal baby blanket than a $20,000 incubator).

Everything, from food distribution (World Concern mobile app tracks distributed food and payments), banking, and agricultural reports is becoming mobile based. Many countries in Africa, in fact, are not only mobile-based, but "mobile-only".

Today's question for other bloggers: what are the impacts of telemedicine on the healthcare industry?


http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/09/18/4272426/as-global-telemedicine-market.html
http://www.giiresearch.com/report/wg239633-telemedicine-monitoring-market-shares-strategies.html

Masdar: Pretty but not Practical

Before I read this weeks article "Out of an Arabian Desert, A Sustainable City Rises," I search for images of the city of the future, Masdar. Through these images, I concluded that this city may be a space ship getting ready to take off. I thought that maybe reading the article would be a good idea. As I read, I was surprised to hear that Norman Foster, the principal partner of Foster & Partners, looked to ancient cities of the middle east for designs that created a comfortable temperature without using air conditioning. Then some of the images I saw started to make sense such as the funnel-like structures in the middle of the city and fake "palm trees." That got me to thinking, why didn't Mr. Foster test his ideas in real cities by making simple design adjustments such as building under the shade of trees or on top of a hill? It doesn't even have to look like a high-tech space ship to achieve results. In fact, it's probably better to implement these ideas in a more cost-effective way than to create a utopian paradise for only the elite.

Throughout this course I have been surprised over and over by the simplicity of high-impact innovations. Masdar is not simplistic has not yet created a high-impact. I don't believe that the Masdar project is really a social innovation. Instead, it looks like a gated community that focuses on aesthetics, design, and exclusiveness more than innovation for the common good. I believe that for something to be a social innovation, it has to better the lives of all people. There are some great ideas that Norman Foster took from other cities, but he didn't apply them in a way that can be easily adjusted for a variety of socioeconomic situations or locations, which leaves out the majority of the population. What we really need to focus on, as far as energy efficiency goes, is lowering the upfront cost of energy efficient innovations.

Currently, there are many great devises, appliances, and energy resources that are underused due to their upfront costs. Although, one may save money in the long run, the initial cost can be too much for an average person. For example, a geothermal heat pump is an energy efficient and environmentally safe way to heat and cool your house by using the constant temperatures of the earth. People can save money over the long run, but few choose to invest. If we can find a way to lower the upfront cost, people will choose to use geothermal vs. gas or electric - if not for saving the earth, for saving money.

Masdar sounds like a great place to visit and enjoy. (It was described as Disneyland.) However, I don't believe it should be the example of a carbon-free, environmentally friendly city. I would like to see more people investing in better ways to lower the carbon footprint of current "real" cities, but in a cost-effective way for the short and long-term.

Frugality Is A Privilege

Having studied the foundations of social innovation and entrepreneurship as a course has given a great picture of its past and present, and a fair idea of its future. The most valuable insight has been that social innovation is aimed not just to provide for the BOP or the underserved, but eventually serves populations that spend several times more for the same product/service. It boils down to one little term: frugality.

Traditionally, any innovation was expected to occur at geographies that had immense wealth, intellect and resources. An increasing responsibility among entrepreneurs, however, has changed that trend in recent decades. Innovators chose smaller, poorer geographies in Asia and Africa to conceive ideas, build solutions at low costs, and then replicate those solutions in developed economies. Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan calls this "reverse innovation." Many western companies have embraced this approach for reasons of both money and the greater good of serving more people. It has come to be famously called 'create far from home, win everywhere.'

While the primary goal of social innovation is to solve the needs of the needy, the idea of reverse innovation has given companies the strategic edge of beating local competition in emerging markets. A local provider sometimes charges exorbitant prices for sub-par products/services. So is there any reason for social innovators to not put the local out of business by stepping in to solve plaguing problems in society? And when cheap and effective solutions are ready, why do developed economies have to pay more? After all, frugality as a privilege is not reserved for the BOP.

The need for frugal innovation and entrepreneurship is only increasing day by day, with growing awareness for quality even among less educated populations. This trend clearly indicates, as mentioned by Prof Zak in our very first class, that social innovation is something that will become regular business for companies and entrepreneurs alike. With society's problems being increasingly solved by social innovators, sonner or later world governments will pitch in with their full support in terms of policies, funds, and other new forms of support (which are, by the way, born as a result of social innovation).

The Competitiveness of the Inner City

In this post, I'll argue that many of the business strategies for innovation that target the base of the global economic pyramid ought to be applied to American inner-cities.  The bottom of the global economic pyramid shares three similar characteristics to distressed sections of American urban cores.

• Significant unmet basic needs
• Cultural norms that differ from the mainstream culture/economy
• Significant economic and business oppportunities

Few will argue that those at the low end of the developing world's economic spectrum have significant-often dire-unmet basic needs.  The issue is more complicated when one considers the poor in urban America.  How can we say that basic needs are unmet when soup kitchens, homeless shelters, welfare programs, etc. abound?  Walk around.  Somehow, people still don't have shelter, kids go to bed with empty stomachs.  I call those unmet needs. 

Take any ghosts that remain from the political discourse surrounding welfare reform in the 90s and exorcise them, please!  The best way to think how cultural norms differ between social classes is through the lens of behavioral economics.  The level of economic security (or insecurity) that one experiences as "normal" is going to affect the way they make decisions in the short term and the long term.  A quick example: I have cut-rate insurance on my car because my net worth is negative: I'm not worth suing.  Once my social venture makes me a billionaire-philanthropist, I'll need more insurance. Cost benefit analysis that balance short term and long term consequences (and all sorts of other types of consequences) affect all kinds of behavior-even the most mundane.   All I'm trying to say here is that the global poor make economic/consumer decisions according to a different calculus that the global middle.  The same goes for the American urban poor versus the American middle class. 

Discourses about poverty (like the politically charged "culture of poverty" debate) tend to obscure the reality present at the bottom of the global economic pyramid and in American inner cities: business opportunity abounds!  Poor communities, yes, even poor people have significant assets that can contribute to economic and social improvement!  Our readings throughout the semester have driven this point home in regards to global poverty.  The Initiative for the Competitive Inner City seeks to create similar awareness regarding American urban cores. 

In both contexts, the point made by two of this week's readings (GE in India and HBR Re-thinking Business Models) rings true: we cannot simply import mainstream business models and tweak them here and there.  We must re-form the business model from the ground up, building on the strengths found in each poor community and exploiting the opportunities. 

Curious to know: What assets do you all observe in poor communities-global and local?  Any ideas to leverage them?

Mobile Banking : EasyPaisa in Pakistan

The concept of M-PESA is remarkably similar to that of EasyPaisa in Pakistan, which basically translates into “Easy Money”. Launched in 2009 by Pakistan’s second largest telecom network, Telenor, EasyPaisa is a mobile financial service in a market that had a paucity of bank accounts yet a multitude of mobile connections. Telenor was able to offer this service as in late 2008 it took over 51% of Tameer Microfinance bank, a fully licensed institution under the State Bank of Pakistan. This allowed Telenor a banking license and led to the start of its financial services wing.

To find the reasons for starting such a project one simply needs to look at the numbers; 88% of Pakistani’s do not have a bank account as compared to 65% of Pakistanis that have mobile connections.  The problem is even more pronounced in the rural areas where there are 2,500 banks serving  up to 105 million people, that’s 42,000 people per bank! The EasyPaisa scheme includes a mobile account that basically acts like a virtual bank account similar to the one in M-PESA. There are thousands of shops that have been identified as EasyPaisa shops and they serve as access points for these banking services. These can be regular grocery/departmental stores or even high end cosmetics dealing establishments. Users can go to any of these access points and deposit or withdraw cash from their accounts.

The service primarily started as a way of facilitating the low-income earning bracket. Individuals who were working in cities doing menial jobs would now have an easy way to send remittances back to their families who were mainly located in villages.  The service also allowed for you to pay your utility bills directly. Telenor has also now included the option of transferring money from abroad to Pakistan. This is a huge benefit to approximately the 7 million Pakistani’s living abroad who send across nearly $8 Billion in remittances annually. Realizing the importance of these transfers to Pakistan’s economy the government has assisted the introduction of cross-border payments at a regulatory level.  As of now there are 18,000 EasyPaisa merchants spread across 700 cities/towns in Pakistan, that’s four times the number of ATM’s in the entire country. A total of $1.7 Billion has been transferred by EasyPaisa since its inception and over 75 million transactions have taken place. For more information regarding the project you can look at http://www.easypaisa.com.pk/index.php for details.

The question that I would like to pose for this week though is what is the single most important factor that would be a good indicator of the success of such a program? For example the program was successful in Nigeria and Pakistan but failed in Tanzania. In both Nigeria and Pakistan there was regulatory support but in Pakistan Telenor was not the market leader as in Nigeria. Also there was no reason to fear the safety of your money in banks as in Nigeria due to the civil strife. There must be some underlying rules that would allow us to gauge whether a country can be receptive to such a solution. What these rules are though is what needs to be answered with a greater level of clarity.

Social Innovation and Enterprise in the Future

Today, two factors mark the character of our economy – they are innovation and enterprise. Innovation can come in many forms – products, processes or even new markets while the entrepreneur is the one who works to use innovation to the advantage in order to achieve success and this can be done by either a profit or non-profit business model. Historically, the difference between the two has primarily been that the former was focused on delivering a profit and the latter was marked by the goal of helping others. As we wrap up this class, these details become less clear and more of a cause for discussion.

As we have moved through class discussion, this distinction has started to get blurry as newer social entrepreneurship models seem to do both. As this line continues to get fuzzy, I begin to wonder what happens to this differentiation if meeting social needs becomes the core values for the majority of new economic activities?

Does a double or triple bottom line change the way we perceive a business? Does it affect the way the business itself is run? Probably and yet the financial distinction between organizations has proven that it does not necessarily mean one will be favored by the public over another, or that one is more sustainable than another and in some of the most interesting cases, organizations begin to take the best of both.

This is where I see the continuation and expansion of the social innovation and enterprise models going. I believe that modern entrepreneurs are now aware of the sense of social responsibility and making a contribution to the world through work. At a minimum, businesses understand the trend and are driven by a commitment to be the most visible, most up to date and trendiest members of the business world.

But there are challenges yet to overcome. I know I’ve discussed some of them before – the lack metrics in order to measure quality or effectiveness of some of these technological innovations and well as connecting the dots of the ripple effect these new ideas can have. Perhaps it just needs more time – time may tell us whether things are successful and worth their pursuit as it has been done historically.

Additionally, social innovations aren’t always models that can be reproduced as the need arises. We have discussed over the course how even the best ideas fail because they are ahead or behind their times. So, hopefully recording the ideas, monitoring their progress and advocating their successes when they arise will support and expand the future of social innovation.  

The Balance Between Adapting To Other Cultures And Promoting What You Know is Right

Both GE Remodels Businesses in India and New Business Models in Emerging Markets discuss where business strategies should start in emerging markets. That is, they both argue that it is more effective to design a product and plan based on the existing culture and history of a specific location as opposed to presenting successful models to other areas and trying to get them to adapt. 

Something that I found especially interesting is the quote by GE's marketing director, Ravi Kaushik: "We're targeting the bottom of the pyramid because that's where the masses exist. I have the technology, and I need to get it to the lowest market." 

Similarly, in the HBR piece, the authors express a need to reconceive the business model. They identify researching unmet jobs and building blueprints based on that as essential tools for implementing a model that evolves with the specific society’s culture.

Regarding this week’s topic of the future of social innovation and enterprise, I think that these authors hit the nail on the head in terms of evaluating the local market and approaching ventures from the viewpoint of a startup. Initially, social enterprises cannot expect profits. They need to expect that their venture will hit a wall in terms of culture, traditions, and ideas of the region. Only once a plan is made to bypass this barrier can the social venture expect to see some turnaround- in the form of acceptance before profit margin.

It makes me think of Plumpy’nut- I’m sure that even though the entrepreneurs were ready for people to be confused by and potentially against the idea of this food, they immersed their product in a way to make it fit into the culture of their market. They thought beyond America’s acceptance and appreciation for the flavor of peanut butter and designed their strategy such that people would come to them as opposed to forcing people to feed it to their children. They established stations that were accessible and that would ensure Plumy’nut could be further recognized through word of mouth. I believe that the society’s acceptance of Plumpy’nut came partially from interest, but largely from need. My question is- how much desperation in a society should an aspiring entrepreneur accept before becoming more forceful with their business? While Plumpy’nut’s strategy of attracting the people to come to them was a good one, if it took too long, should they have eventually changed their product to be more of a flavor that the society would accept quickly, even if it meant that it was not as effective? Where is the line drawn between where an organization should be tweaking its products to be relatable to their target audience and where an organization should not accept reluctance and continue to enforce what they think is right?