A teacher, a farmer, and an atomic physicist walk into a bar…

The beautiful thing about social innovation is anyone can do it. Not everyone has a breakthrough idea, but it doesn’t take an atomic physicist to come up with one (although sometimes they do). Whether it’s education, health, technology, or the environment, problems abound in our society. Some issues are more obvious, like refugees struggling with temporary housing, and others are less so, like the need for a cheap alternative computer. The faces of the innovators who find these solutions are as varied as the issues themselves. From a farmer who designed a mobile application to monitor dairy cows, to a teacher who created an entire online education movement, they prove that ordinary people have the power to do extraordinary things.

I find these social innovators inspiring, and it make me wonder how these ordinary people became the social entrepreneurs they are today. The obvious first step is to have an idea, but what does it take to transform that idea into an innovation? One of the first major obstacles is money. When Sal Khan first started developing his online learning videos, he was a one man team creating YouTube videos out of a walk-in closet. It wasn’t until he received his first check from Ann Doerr that he was able to make Khan Academy a reality [1]. Nowadays, there are multiple ways to find funding, whether it’s pitching ideas to investors, or crowdfunding through websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Even if you find funding, though, there’s no guarantee your idea will be successful.

More often than not, social entrepreneurs fail to get their ideas off the ground, even when they are able to design innovative solutions. Many of these failures stem from a lack of knowledge and access to the right people. In my past job, our department had a vision for success that said, “We need the right people, in the right place, at the right time, in the right job.” Imagine how many successful new ventures could be created if aspiring social entrepreneurs had a way to easily connect with the right people who could take their solution from a simple idea to an innovation. The path to innovation is far from easy, but if we can find a way to streamline the process and expand accessibility, maybe we can solve some of the world’s problems a little more efficiently.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/11/02/one-man-one-computer-10-million-students-how-khan-academy-is-reinventing-education/

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