The Distribution of Ideas and Innovations

The theme of the third week of Foundations of Social Innovation and Enterprise is Solutions and Enablers to Deliver Basic Human Needs, which focuses on the innovative technologies used to guarantee a certain degree of standard of living for people in third world countries. Some of these innovations are used to help deliver clean water in innovative ways that use their environment to take the place of time-consuming and inefficient methods like chlorine tablets or less reliable filters. Other projects also use solar power or even gravity to bring heat and power to areas that would otherwise possibly be too remote to otherwise have those needs fulfilled. These ideas are quite often very well thought-out and solve the problem in creative and sometimes awe-inspiring ways but by having a reliance on an overseas producer can have distribution or dependence issues later.

This particular problem is illustrated in the TechCrunch article Where in the World Are The 1.2M Raspberry Pi Microcomputers, which looks at who has been purchasing the easily-programmed Raspberry Pi Microcomputers since their release. TechCrunch found that much of the devices were shipped to developed nations like the United States or United Kingdom, which was somewhat surprising considering the potential for low-cost education and innovation that comes with the highly-customizable and user-friendly computing platform. Raspberry Pi and similar innovations lower the high entry cost for citizens of developing countries to interact with the rest of the world, educate themselves and raise their standard of living, but that potential  will never become more than theory as long as distribution channels for innovation don’t improve.

With that in mind, some of the innovations utilizing apps in conjunction with technology people already have are particularly interesting because they are able to deliver innovation without as many problems with distribution. Since users already have the hardware, their only concern is the software, which can be downloaded remotely as long as there is some type of reception. An app like iCOW, which provides information to small-scale farmers allows them to have a reminder that keeps them on-task with the maintenance of their herd and helps to preserve their livelihood while also allowing them to improve their efficiency and cattle management. Most importantly though, is the fact that this innovation for farmers is able to be delivered remotely using technology they already have.

The most promising innovations are the ones like the Inye computer tablet mentioned in the Africa Innovations article, which are developed in Nigeria and are able to provide computing power at a paltry £200 and utilize the infrastructure that is present for their ability to provide entry to the world wide web but to do so in a way that is tailored to that particular setting’s needs while also skirting around how to get those computers to the people who would use them. While Raspberry Pi the other projects are very promising they have distribution problems, making developments like Inye seem more holistic and self-perpetuating than a possible over-reliance on foreign intervention.

Are Emerging Economies Better Positioned for Sea Change in the Global Economy?

The McKinsey Global Institute [1] sites four global forces that are reshaping the world: urbanization, accelerating technological change, the challenges of an aging world population, and greater global connections in areas such as trade, people, finance and data. The article calls to action corporations and economies to ready themselves for very uncertain and differentiated future times and to resist the urge to rely on past experiences to inform future behavior. As this sea change occurs with the confluence of all four trends happening at the same time, might this unknown future landscape level the playing field amongst developed and developing nations? With past experience becoming less valuable in dramatically changed times, might developing countries benefit from starting with a “clean slate” and relying more on data analysis than intuition?

Yes. A great opportunity exists for developing countries to “leapfrog” a significant portion of the traditional development path. In particular the changing demographics and accelerating technological change coupled with connection in data position these countries better to navigate the waters of the sea change.

The article sites that for the first time in human history our aging world population could mean that the planet’s population will plateau in most of the world. The operative world is “most.” Many developing countries continue to see a growing population. And although this growing population puts greater pressure on resources, it also affords a larger workforce. If developing countries must traverse some of the traditional development path and initially rely on labor-intensive activities, there is a workforce to support such an occasion.

Ideally emerging nations will be able to more quickly transition their labor force from lower-skilled to middle-skilled. Accelerated technology will enable this transition. As stated in the article, “Technology offers the promise of economic progress for billions in emerging economies at a speed that would have been unimaginable without the mobile Internet…[and allows business] to gain scale with stunning speed while using little capital.” Business is not the only sector to gain scale with using little capital; government and non-profit organizations have to potential to leverage technology and data for growth and greater impact. For example, mature economies and governments may heavily rely upon past experiences regarding how to react to dramatic changes. Although much data and analysis exists, these established organizations often favor their “guts.” Additionally, an established organization may desire to apply a drastically different approach in response to the change but the organization is too rigid, large, or complex to execute. Emerging nations however may be starting with fewer formalized systems or no systems at all. Also, having little to no past experience with a particular challenge may lend the organization to more heavily rely upon data. Combined theses emerging countries have the elasticity and bias towards data-driven decisions to address new challenges with new approaches. Moreover developing nations have been doing more with less for generations; there is an industriousness that may be applied to taking advantage of ubiquitous technology such a mobile. We see this with applications in mFarming, mHealth and mBanking.

[1] The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends (McKinsey Quarterly, April 2015); http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/the_four_global_forces_breaking_all_the_trends

Simple & Customized, a Novel Solution. 

If everything worked as planned, we won’t need policymakers. 

More often than we like, we see well-intentioned policies leading to little or negligible intended impact. It takes a lot of novel thought-process, research & administrative resources to try and implement a policy and yet, we fail to produce the desired impact in majority of cases. 

Much research has gone into proving that we need more specialised solutions for different population groups based on different characteristics like income, employment, gender among other factors. This is usually not a simple exercise, because more often than not, we are dealing with tons of inter-related factors to find an appropriate solution. Often, we either misinterpret or completely overlook the necessary determinant to the success or failure of a socially driven exercise. 

A case in point could be a research which was done to find a possible co-relation between education & income levels among population. The question was if giving out subsidised education to students can work towards increased attendance and lower drop out levels. The data showed strong correlation between disposable income & education levels among different population groups but a simple scheme to this effect hardly produced any desired impact. As it turned out, the real factor which led to higher education levels was not income, but the “education of mother” in a particular household. It was so observed that this particular factor(Mother’s education) was also the causal factor for higher income levels & hence a shift away from the initial "education subsidy" policy was required to bring about a significant impact in the medium to long run to impact literacy levels. [1]

Another example is the widely popular scheme of Microfinance which with its seemingly obvious benefits, failed to produce the desired impact because of a simple design flaw. While the primary idea of lending small sums of money to a large population had the potential to reduce underlying risk, the benefits were not as clearly observed as estimated. Money was lent to the vast majority of poor population without recognizing the end objective to which it would be used. As it turned out, a large share pf population was spending the borrowed money on subsistence activities like shelter, clothing & one-time expenditures like marriage or birth of a son which brought about little economic benefit in any time-span. This led to high default rates & far-reaching disastrous effects like increase in suicides, community troubles & decreased income levels. This is a sad example of a brilliant idea not reaching its intended potential due to a small design flaw & a one-size-fits-all approach. [2]

In recent years, private players & non-governmental organizations are playing a huge role in devising customized solutions in a much more practical way than what generic policies have done in the past. The inclusion of private players has brought about a fresh breeze of innovative solutions which has in turn encouraged more & more organizations catering to the specific needs of a unique population groups with different needs to be addressed.

 A very simple & elegant solution which can support this claim is the recent collaboration of a company named Grey Group, based out of Singapore with an NGO called “The Neelvasant Medical Foundation and Research Center” based out of India to distribute “iodine-coated bindis”** to rural Indian females. The “bindis”, are a sort of a religious and cosmetic enhancement applied on the forehead by women in India. As it turned out, the product was seamlessly absorbed by the rural females as an existing social practice. These bindis in-turn worked like iodine patches which provided the daily needs of iodine to the intended population. While this is still a new concept, it found huge success in its pilot form and is currently being heavily invested in to solve the iodine-deficiency among rural Indian women. [3]

This is just one example of the array of initiatives bringing about customary solutions in developmental areas but provides a glimpse of how a simple idea can bring about a huge impact. What remains to be seen is how many more such initiatives will we see in the coming future, and how many of those would be financially feasible. What is also an interesting question is what can policy makers do to invite more private players in this area. 

[1] Book: Mostly Harmless Econometrics:An Empiricist's Companion, Joshua D. Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke

[2] http://ssir.org/articles/entry/microfinance_misses_its_mark/

[3]http://thecommonstory.com/a-bindi-became-a-life-saving-initiative/

**Lack of Iodine could cause various severe and life threatening diseases to women such as breast cancer, brain damage and several pregnancy-related complications

Positive Deviance

“Social challenges require systematic solutions that are grounded in the client’s or customer’s needs”[1] This summarise the articles premise of building social ventures that can be compatible with the ground realities of the society they cater to.  The article builds up a case for the importance, value, and need for design thinking in the creation of business and social systems. A key insight that the article has to offer is one regarding ‘Positive Deviance’. Positive deviance is a concept that is well rooted in the principles of providing ‘inside solutions’[2]to problems instead of imposing them from the outside.

Positive Deviance focuses on developing sustainable solutions to problems in a way that creates an almost automated system that ends up reducing or altogether eliminating the initial problem. The way that Positive Deviance does this is through the creation of solutions from elements that are already existent in the system or community instead of bringing in new elements from outside the system. [3]

In my experience working for the Association For the Development of Pakistan (ADP), I realised that many social ventures tend to miss out on vital opportunities in catering to significant parts of the community due to inherent flaws in the design. Design Thinking is a very plausible way of overcoming these flaws and Positive Deviance, in its essence, can be the key that puts design thinking to action. My work with ADP sent me to various schools in interior Sindh (a poor region of Pakistan, where adult literacy is as low as 20%)[4]. While there, I discovered that although a lot of money and resources were being spent on the schools (infrastructure, trainings, etc.), the students and their families were hardly benefitting from these endeavours as due to cultural barriers most families were not sending their children to these schools which were being run by ‘outsiders’. The application of Positive Deviance in such a case would have proved beneficial where the local community would have been observed, local children and their families would have been observed, and any ‘positive deviants’ would have been selected in order to create a sustainable solution for the school systems in that community.

---

[1,2] Design Thinking for Social Innovation By Tim Brown & Jocelyn Wyatt

[3] The Positive Deviance Approach to Behavioral and Social Change By R. Swartz

[4] The Invisible Partition of Sindh By Tahir Mehdi

DOOMED DESIGN THINKING

Design thinking is the answer to most of the concerns of the modern world whenever faced with the question of resource constraints. In the article, design thinking for social innovation, the process has been creatively described ‘as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps’[1]. Each of the three spaces overlap in such a manner where they form a logical association while retaining independence at each of the respective space. This arrangement gives each of the space the necessary freedom to add value to the purpose.

In my experience of working with two international development organizations in Pakistan with a large stakeholder base that included the Governments of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, I have found that a lot of resources are invested in the inspiration and ideation phase especially when public welfare projects are being funded by the international donor agencies. A lot of emphasis is put on generating the objective(s) while taking on board a diverse group of stakeholders. This group is then supported by a set of expensive consultants, who are specialists in their domain, to refine the objective, outputs and propose action plans. These two process are what my newly acquired vocabulary would put as inspiration and ideation.

Despite the tremendous investment on the above two spaces, where creative approaches to problem-at-hand are translated into radical solutions, most of these efforts fail due to poor implementation. Reasons behind such failures in a multi-stakeholder platform range from budgetary pressure to spend allocated funds, time limitation for limited field testing, donor driven agenda, non-alignment of priorities, absence of operational accountability and most importantly the absence of leadership amongst institutional stakeholders.

These scenarios are deeply disappointing when poor implementation results in non-fulfillment of program objectives for the large population at the center of the problem.

---

[1] Brown, Tim, Wyatt, Jocelyn. “Design Thinking for Social Innovation”.  Stanford Social Innovation Review. 2010. Website visited on 08 Sept 2015

Can social enterprises be rich?

 “To succeed, these (social) ventures must adhere to both social goals and stiff financial constraints.” [1]

Farmers historically have been severely exploited by a chain of middlemen, but very few existing models sustainably connects them directly with the end consumers. Having worked with a Social Enterprise that directly worked towards bringing marginal farmers (farmers who do not own more than 2 acres of land) and retailers together, I constantly faced several bottlenecks concerning the availability of funds.  Our team was actively seeking funds and grants from the foundations and trusts, working closely with the government to avail tax benefits and subsidies and devising financial models to bring in as much revenue as possible – both to sustain the organization and to provide a fair share to the farmer. The project was ran through a Hybrid model.

There were many challenges with this model.

 A) A disproportionate amount of time was spent in writing donor reports and proposals. Since trusts don’t prefer to work with small numbers, we had to either scale the project (purely to adhere to the foundation’s mandate) or show inflated numbers so we could fall under the “high impact” category.

B) The same was the case with partnering with government agencies. Moreover, the bureaucracy was acutely high in these agencies. Both sources of funding were “difficult to guarantee indefinitely” [2]. More often than not, the question of financial viability was in question.

  “For social entrepreneurs, the social mission is explicit and central.” [3]

Though definition [1] was most obvious, there was a resistance and a sense of guilt amongst stakeholders (employees, farmer leaders, organization heads) in adhering to “stiff financial constraints”. Ideas on making revenues or engaging in income generation activities were rubbished as ignoring the core mission. I was almost ashamed to ask the question that has been daunting me for the past couple of years, “Is it OK for a Social Enterprise to be rich?” When a fellow classmate brought this question up in a class discussion, Proff Z’s quote, “No Money, No mission”, struck the chord perfectly.  Financial sustainability or sometimes profitability is after all is a key component in maximizing impact. It reiterated that, “by grow­ing (a steady) rev­enue, improv­ing gross and oper­at­ing mar­gins, increas­ing free cash flow, effi­ciently man­ag­ing both cap­i­tal expen­di­tures and work­ing cap­i­tal, and build­ing an asset base” [4] the goal of Social impact is not compromised in anyway.

 

                                                            Image from Google

 

One of the classic cases is the Arvind Eye Care Hospital in India. Arvind Eye Care follows a “cross subsidization” approach wherein the rich pay for the services while the poor (BPL population) do not.  Though the same doctor performs surgery on either of the patients, the relatively wealthier patient pays for other value add services such as an exclusive para medical care, better boarding and lodging facilities, etc. while the subsidized patient just avails the very basic amenities.

Though the Hybrid model is not a one size fit all approach (some of the greatest social innovations did come from a government agencies or not for profit models) to solving social problems, this approach is not to be dismissed. The amount of time and resources that needs be dedicated to each (Impact vs Profitability) are variable, but they most certainly are not mutually exclusive. The organization or the enterprise could clearly defines the priority of each while constantly reevaluating the goals and objectives as the project progresses though time, scale and geographical boundaries. In the end, high impact organizations can be rich as long as they build an effective mechanism so that the different stakeholders, while receiving real time market based inputs, do not lose track of the shared Mission and Values of the project.

 

 [1] https://hbr.org/2015/05/two-keys-to-sustainable-social-enterprise

[2]. https://hbr.org/2015/05/two-keys-to-sustainable-social-enterprise

[3] The Meaning of “Social Entrepreneurship” J. Gregory Dees

[4] http://www.northeastern.edu/sei/2013/09/how-to-build-financially-sustainable-social-enterprises/

An Aging New World

In the article, “The Four Global Forces Breaking all the Trends,” the authors discuss the disruptive forces of urbanization, accelerating technological change, an aging workforce, and globalization.  There is no stopping these forces as they all happen simultaneously to one another.  As we find ourselves in an increasingly interconnected world, it is becoming more apparent that the world must find ways to handle the challenges faced by an aging population.  First, innovation is necessary in order to replace the aging workforce as lower fertility rates lead to an eventual decrease in population.  Secondly, we must find a way to care for the increasing amount of elderly as the baby boomers approach retirement age and life expectancy continues to increase.

While a decrease in population might be good news for an over-crowded planet, it can negatively impact the economy.  The economy grows as people join the workforce each year.  More people working equals more production, earning, and spending [1].  As the aging population leaves the workforce, countries need to find ways to make up for the decrease in the working population.  There are two obvious options: find ways to encourage people to work longer and create technological advances that could replace the aging workforce.  The first option will likely require government intervention.  Currently the United States is incrementally increasing the retirement age.  Although this is for different reasons, it will lead to more people staying in the workforce for longer periods of time.  They also encourage people to work longer by increasing the social security benefit that they receive if they wait longer to retire. 

Another way to deal with a smaller workforce is through technological advances. Technological advances can pertain to any line of work, but manufacturing stands out in this case.  As the workforce in manufacturing declines, so does production and therefore the nation’s GDP.  In order to save the economy from a potential decline, innovation is necessary.  Further investment toward advances in efficient practices and robotic automation will become more and more essential as the world progresses forward.

While the world must be innovative in the way it handles the decrease in its workforce, it must also find ways to handle an overwhelming amount of elderly.  Elder care is in demand as multi-generational households become less common.  So how do we prepare for this?  How do we make sure that every elderly person receives the care they need as the price of this care remains unaffordable for many?  This is a very real issue with no obvious answers.  Is the answer in policy, technology, or a social venture; perhaps all three? 

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/dropping-birth-rates-threaten-global-economic-growth/

A Look at the 2030 Prophecies of the N.I.C.

In a world full of unknowns, it’s amazing we can pick out major trends and drivers, and come up with likely scenarios for our future. While reading the Global Trends 2030 report, I was immediately drawn to the “Alternative Worlds” section in which the National Intelligence Council detailed four potential scenarios for the future. As an engineer, my first reaction was to try to make sense of the scenarios by boiling them down to an equation - some f (megatrends, game-changers) = alternative world scenario. While that was mostly a futile exercise, it did push me to consider each scenario and which one seemed most likely, given my perspective and knowledge of the world. While I don’t completely agree with any one scenario, the “Gini Out-of-the-Bottle” and “Nonstate World” each have components that I would consider in my own 2030 vision.

In “Gini Out-of-the-Bottle,” some of the key drivers are the domination of inequalities, U.S. energy independence, and the U.S. reducing its “global policeman” tendencies. Economic inequality still runs rampant in our society, with little push from either end to fix it. These circles of “the rich get richer” and “the poor stay poor” are deeply entrenched in many cultures and economic policies, and will take longer than 2030 to fix, or even improve. As for U.S. energy independence, we are nearly there today. I worked in the Oil and Gas industry for three years, and the advancement of technology has pushed the U.S. to the forefront of exploration and production techniques. This independence will likely shift the U.S. foreign policies away from oil-bearing nations (i.e. the Middle East), and will retrain focus on domestic issues. This will overall reduce the need for the U.S. to play the “global policeman.”

In “Nonstate World,” the primary driver is the increasing power of nonstate actors. Even today, the income elite of the world and private companies have a great deal of influence over governmental entities and policies, although no official role. In the future, it is likely these individuals and companies could form the “hybrid coalitions” discussed in the report, and gain a more official role in government undertakings. While this could potentially facilitate greater international cooperation, there is the potential for it to drown out the voice of the middle and lower class, and further perpetuate the inequalities mentioned in “Gini Out-of-the-Bottle.”

Thinking about your own vision of the world, which of the four “Alternative Worlds” do you think we will end up with in 2030?

Doubts on Global Conflict Predictions

The National Intelligence Councils Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (2012) publication highlights several current and ongoing global trends which are then extrapolated out over the next 20 years to predict the major shifts in geopolitical relations.  The megatrends predictions in this publication seem tautological and most of them are already undergoing.  Doubtful are the more acute predictions the publication makes especially regarding armed conflict around the world.  Although the publication cites measurable decreases in the number of civilian and military casualties over the past two decades, other metrics which the publication disregards suggest the opposite trend may be at play. (59) For example, the proliferation of interstate cyber-warfare has the potential to inflict low cost to human life, but great cost to economies, infrastructure, or security.   The potential for nuclear conflict, especially on the Korean peninsular, the Middle East, or on the Indian sub-continent are larger than they have ever been before. 

The decline in interstate conflict, which the publication acknowledges, was widely cited among academics and members of the policy community during the 1990s as proof that the international system had become so benign that the United States no longer faced serious security threats of any kind.[i]  Chief among these academics was Dr. Francis Fukuyama who, in his famous book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) asserted that there existed an international consensus favoring democracy and free markets and the prediction that major conflict and war would be essentially a thing of the past.  The peace witnessed directly after the fall of the Soviet Union proved to be ephemeral.  The rise and rapid globalization of the phenomenon of international jihadism was not predicted in the years following the collapse of the USSR.   There is no evidence to suggest that our power of prediction in international relations and global conflict has improved over the last 15 years.  The point being, extrapolations into the future, even the seemingly near future of 10-15 years, tend to miss the mark.  Considering the National Intelligence Councils publication in 2012, it is worthwhile to note that there is no mention of the Islamic State, a non-state actor, with nation-state ambitions that has upended geopolitical dynamics in the Middle East. 

Increased demand for critical resources such as food, water, and energy, which the report discusses at length, may lead to increases in international conflict.   Countries such as Pakistan or India, which both have nuclear arsenals and large population that demand resource consumption, may be pushed to adopt more aggressive postures for these reasons.   

While fertility rates in most of the developed world are declining, this is not true for much of Sub-Saharan Africa. (60) Resource competition as well as large populations of young people goes against the publication’s prediction of a more peaceful world in the coming decades.

Finally, according to the United Nations, there are almost 60 million displaced refugees in the world today, most due to war and conflict.[ii]  The ongoing European immigration crisis is noticeably absent from the national Intelligence Council’s predictions.  Such diaspora is sure to cause intrastate tension and possibly violence.

Ultimately, this article seems more confident in the forces favoring peaceful global interaction.  However, the international system is inherently unpredictable and any extrapolations for future trends in geopolitics should be taken with a heavy dosage of salt and skepticism.

---

[i] Gaddis, John Lewis.  Surprise, Security, and the American Experience. 2004. Page 76.

[ii] According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2014 Report. http://unhcr.org/556725e69.html

The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Innovations

     Social innovators are on a mission to tackle the world's most crippling problems. One major issue attacking much of Africa is malaria; the fatal disease carried by mosquitos where the highest number of deaths are from children. The design thinking process was used through steps of inspiration and ideation; insecticide-treated nets with small holes were given in masses to families in African states for use as a canopy while sleeping. The World Health Organization found that the nets lowered deaths overall, especially in children under age 5 by 51% in Ethiopia, 34% in Ghana, and 66% in Rwanda [1]. The nets were extremely effective in lowering malaria cases when used properly. 

      With all successes, however, come unintended negative consequences. 

      The implementation of the product design ran into problems almost instantaneously. First, hospitals were giving expectant mothers nets for free when they came in for doctor visits. This method was effective for villagers with little access to protect their children. This did, however, cause the nets to be a non-profitable item for shop owners to sell, making it difficult for people in cities to purchase them for protection. Hospitals did not have the ability to sell the nets they gave to expectant mothers either; there by causing gains in malaria cases.

Second unexpected consequence, the mosquito repelling nets made an excellent fishing tool.  

        In Zambia and Mozambique there are growing number of malaria cases as the nets come straight from packages and into the local lakes and streams to gather fish. The villagers are namely fond of the small holes that are able to grasp all wildlife. Unfortunately, the insecticide-treated nets are placed into already contaminated waters and causing an increase in other health problems amongst the villagers. Furthermore, families take multiple nets and sew them together to cover larger span of marine life in the lakes. Considering that the fish population is already scarce, this practice  of net usage will lead to a critical food source shortage for the millions of the world’s poorest people [2]. 

Fisherman have been reduced to fist fights over traditional fishing methods vs the catch-all methods using a free tent. Legislation is being drafted to stop the local population from using the nets for anything but their intended design. 

This leaves us with a conundrum: Do we denounce the successes of the malaria repelling nets because, when used improperly, they lead to higher rates of malaria and other diseases? How do we prioritize one crippling problem (malaria) over another (malnutrition) when researching and implementing social ventures?

[1] Design Thinking for Social Innovation, Stanford Social Innovation Review (2010) http://ssir.org/articles/entry/design_thinking_for_social_innovation/

 [2] Meant to Keep Malaria Out, Mosquito Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In (2015) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/africa/mosquito-nets-for-malaria-spawn-new-epidemic-overfishing.html?_r=0#

The Benefits of Designing from the Bottom-Up

            The theme of week two of Foundations of Social Innovation and Enterprise is “Drivers of Social Innovation and Human-Centered Design Thinking” and the article The Importance of Frugal Engineering explores the manner in which products for emerging markets have required changes in the way they are designed in order to adapt to the different needs that people in emerging markets need. Product development in the United States typically focuses much more strictly on functionality for the perceived customer but utilizes a much more prolonged set of tactics to do so, performing research by way of focus groups and relying on sometimes overwhelmingly large teams. The goal of this is to use focus groups and a series of surveys to find out what the consumer wants, how they will use the product or how that product can be altered to capture a larger portion of the market. Here costs are then cut by making the best model possible and then removing features to drive costs down.

            People in emerging markets are finding a new degree of largesse as their stake in the world economy grows and they increasingly are buying what would have previously been luxuries, though they’re looking for the more basic and no-frills ways to have those experiences. However in a different environment and culture what is considered basic can be completely different and by looking for inspiration in that environment it is possible to have a more successful product. An example of this would be the Tata Nano, which used the rickshaw, which was more of the cultural norm and better for navigating the traffic of cities like Mumbai than the traditional car. By building a profoundly cheap car from the ground up and focusing on features their market actually needed, Tata was able to use simplicity to deliver the experience its market needed.

Conversely, by ignoring that environment’s particular needs and having a product that focuses on the wrong aspects, distribution channels, or way of implementing things everything can end up being for naught in the end, as found in the other assigned article Design Thinking for Social Innovation’s cases where in Ghana mosquito nets that could have drastically cut instances malaria weren’t distributed due to a short-sighted focus on pregnant women and recent mothers as well as a lack of nets for hospitals or other possible vendors. While the nets themselves worked spectacularly, a lack of opportunity for many others to purchase these meant a large segment of the population went without these potentially life-saving nets and Ghana saw much less of an impact from this program as similar programs in Ethiopia or Rwanda, showing how good intentions can easily be trumped by a missed aspect of the problem.

            Emerging markets’ design of products and programs can’t hope to copy-paste strategies that work in the first world and hope for automatic success, they need to focus on their customer base and how to deliver and distribute the best possible experience to them in particular.