Private sector provides insight: Incorporating customer needs into social innovation

The article about “Human-centered design” basically tells us: certain processes developed in the private sector can facilitate the perfection of social innovation as to reach more people in need. The “Frugal engineering” article emphasized the same theme: understanding the customers.

It is a key concept in the private sector that products, no matter how fancy, are nothing without getting customer recognition. This idea can be borrowed to the social innovation arena that “market research” should be carried out to identify the “target customers”.

I found more blogs and articles that kind of delved more into this topic, providing more examples and illustration.

1.

These three blogs talked about: In what ways can businesses be a source of social innovation?

1) New products, services or markets;

2) Environmental stewardship;

3) Social well-being of their employees and the communities in which they operate.

http://www.strategies-direction.com/business-as-a-source-of-social-innovation-part-1-new-products-services-or-markets/

http://www.strategies-direction.com/business-as-a-source-of-social-innovation-part-2-environmental-stewardship/

http://www.strategies-direction.com/business-as-a-source-of-social-innovation-part-3-social-well-being/

Take-Away here:

Many successful companies adopt inclusive market strategies to target neglected segments in the society. Social innovations can learn from these cases, especially how they developed a way of studying customers and expanding market.

2.

Social innovation: Creating products for those at the bottom of the pyramid

http://knowledge.insead.edu/csr/social-entrepreneurship/creating-products-for-those-at-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid-1957

Quote: When creating innovative, new products for markets at the base of the pyramid, Peter White, Director of Global Sustainability at Procter & Gamble, notes that cost alone is not the issue. “It’s not just about making consumer products cheaper,” he says. “You’ve got to come up with products that actually meet the specific needs at the bottom of the pyramid.  How do you design products that people need? You have to actually go and find out, and so we send researchers to find out how people live – how they do their washing, their cleaning (and) what are their problems.”

Take-away here:

This article mentioned other key features of a successful social innovation other than low costs, including:

1)   Access

2)   Partnership

3)   Distribution channels

4)   Sustainable models

Resulting from years of practice, business models got mature and functional. A lot of the models and factors can actually foster thoughts and improvements in social innovations.

Here’s my question:

Just as the second article said: a growing number of global companies are being drawn to the seductive idea that money can be made by developing and marketing products for those at the bottom of the pyramid. How to make sure the money we make from the poor does not override the good we do for them? Is there a boundary between using them and helping them? Are we gonna face resistance because of this? Or at least how can we make a win-win situation?