Disruptive Global Trends and How They Interact

Urbanization, accelerating technological change, aging populations, and increased global connections—these are the four fundamental disruptive forces mentioned in article, “The four global forces breaking all the trends”. Japan is a perfect example of how these four trends are all interconnected how they can utilize certain forces to address their most problematic trend of an aging population.

About one fourth of Japan’s population consists of the elderly, those 65 and older. Currently, the country’s low birthrate means that there are not enough people being born to replace those that die. This results in a population imbalance and the country is faced with the issue of how best to service their elderly’s health needs. 

The video, “Japan’s Baby Drain”, highlights all of the issues faced in country with an aging population. The video made an interesting example of a town in Japan called Nanmoku—the town consists of mainly old people. The town used to have a sizable population over 1200 children attending elementary, but now they are left with just 37 students. The 1^st grade class, consisting of just one student, further highlights the population divide between the old and the young. To add to the mix, the disruptive trend of urbanization has drawn all the young people of working age to nearby Tokyo, leaving Nanmoku reminiscent of a ghost town. And ironically, as a contrast to the empty elementary schools in Nanmoku, elderly centers in Tokyo are bustling with patients and lack enough health workers to service them all. But we see that one disruptive trend, increased global connectivity, can come to the aid of aging populations; the video interviews foreign workers who have come to Japan from developing countries to fill the demand for more caretakers.  As the populations of advanced economies age, they will have to take advantage of the increasing global connectivity and draw upon workers from developing countries.

The video also shows an interesting segment on how Japan is utilizing accelerating technological changes to address the trend of its aging population. Toyota is the process of developing an advanced robot capable of assisting elderly patients with daily activities. Although the project is far from completion, designing a robot to replace some of the duties of health workers would alleviate the shortage of manpower.

Japan serves as an interesting example for developed economies—their current situation is a parallel to what other advanced nations, such as the United States, will face in the near future. The four forces consisting of increasing urbanization, technological advancement, aging demographics, and global connectivity will no doubt bring about huge changes, but they are all interconnected and will evolve simultaneously. Also, as Japan as shown, it is possible to utilize the various forces to solve problems that arise in one.

Social Design to Effect Social Change

When I think of traditional design thinking, I think about chairs. 

                  Credit here                            Credit here                          Credit here 

All of these chairs look very different; colors, shapes, or materials used. These chairs have evolved from the first chairs created by the Egyptians, but still serve the same purpose: sitting. Designing can be seen as evolving process.  The concept of design has been expanded from physical objects like chairs, to the non-profit sector. 

In “Design Thinking for Social Innovation” coauthors Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt highlight many design thinking examples in the social sector that I personally related to, though one stands out more than others. I served two years of AmeriCorps with Public Allies Pittsburgh, a national AmeriCorps program, who’s mission is “to advance new leadership to strength communities, nonprofits, and civic participation.”  As a Public Ally, I worked on a Team Service Project (TSP), were my team and I immersed ourselves in a community or a cause. My first year my TSP team worked in the community of Greenfield in Pittsburgh and my second year my TSP team worked to help eliminate childhood obesity in Allegheny County where Pittsburgh is located.

I immediately related to Jerry Sternin and his wife.  Brown and Wyatt explain how the Sternins and their team immersed themselves into four poor communities in Than Hoa, Vietnam.  The team wanted to learn how “very, very poor families” kept their children healthy.They learned it was from food handling and choosing food with high nutrients, even if some foods with high nutrition value were usually not eaten by children for fear of making them ill. From this experience of working with these “positive deviants,” the social change of offering cooking classes to those with malnutrition children helped improve the health of 800 children in the first year of the program alone. 

Brown and Wyatt tell readers, “Sternins was skilled at identifying what and critical of what he called outsider solutions to local problems.” There were two routes he could have taken during his stay in Vietnam. The first option would be going into the Quong Xuong communities, disregard the culture and the needs of the community, and designing solution to the pre-determined program without fully understanding what their challenges were or seeing the assets the community bring into finding a solution. The second option is how Sternin spent his time in the Quong Zuong communities; learning about the people, providing and supporting the communities, and allowing the community to development their own solution with facilitated guidance of outside support. 

As a member of a TSP group through Public Allies, we followed the route of Sternin.  We helped communities design solutions to challenges the community members identified as being challenges. In my first year working in the community of Greenfield, my team helped facilitate and design an oral history project in response to the major gap between the older Greenfield generation and younger Greenfield generation.  My second year, we partnered with a two local non-profits working on a project to eliminate childhood obesity.  We helped support the pair in creating their strategic and marketing plans, as well as an immersion guide (to work with other communities) 

Jerru Sternin and Public Allies may not have be designed chairs, but chairs are not designed without keeping the consumers in mind. Focus groups and sales tell chair designers what direction to move in. Communities and communities members partner with social innovators to move those communities in a new direction. 

A Match Made in Heaven

In the past decades, emerging markets achieved tremendous growth rates, resulting in rising attention and investments from all over the world. However, many global and local companies are still shy on grasping the substantial opportunities arising from this development. Others decided to take the bet but failed to achieve their full potential, often because of a mismatch between their offering and local needs. My years working for a consulting firm on Africa related topics confirmed this trend as I was faced with several clients who were aware of the Africa opportunity but saw the continent as a big scary spot on the map and didn’t know where or how to start looking into it. On the other hand, many research and analyses that I performed showed that the population is still struggling with day-to-day basic issues that could be addressed by those same companies. It felt like all the ingredients for a great match were available but the recipe was missing out or was at best very fuzzy.

Human-centered design might be the mean to close this loop. This simple and efficient approach caught my eye lately as it has been gaining momentum across various fields and industries. Through a collaborative and inclusive process, it uses insights from the community as a starting block to finding tailored solutions to specific needs. It is different as a problem-solving technique in its emphasis on the discovery and interpretation phases where people and their behaviors are thoroughly observed and distilled. This method is even more relevant in an emerging markets context where people tackle their problems with very simple solutions adapted to their reality and limited resources. Using human-centered design, these solutions can be more easily scaled-up and adapted to reach a larger target, more efficiently.

Quickly stepping back and thinking through this lens, coming myself from an emerging country, Morocco, my brain is already starting to make connections between observations and possible applications. For example, one thing that pops up to my mind is how groups of people use a system called “the Wheel” to save money and finance important expenses: Each month, all members contribute a fixed sum, the total of which is given to one of them based on a draw or an agreement. What if we could find inspiration in this system to improve the bancarization rate? Another system is how independent grocery shops created an informal network to enable people in different locations to buy items for each other: The buyer gives money for a certain item to the grocery shop manager who calls a fellow manager in the desired location asking him to deliver the requested item to the beneficiary. The managers will later balance their accounts through bank transfers. Can this idea help us rethink distribution strategies to easily reach a larger pool of people?

Modern alternatives to these traditional systems exist but the fact that the latter are still used means that needs are not served in the most efficient way. A bottom-up approach like human-centered design could be the missing link between those needs and the resources available in the world. Companies and other organizations can use it as a powerful tool to efficiently address any topic in any market. If adopted on a large scale, this could generate an exponential number of sustainable and efficient solutions that can drastically improve the life of billions of people. The next question is: How can we make that happen?

Preparing developing countries to face the new age of technology innovation

During the last few years the world has experienced a boom in technological innovation. Although the media mostly focus its attention on electronics (smartphones, wearable devices, among others), we have breakthroughs in different fields that can be sometimes unnoticed by the majority of people, are shaping and will continue changing our lives substantially.

McKinsey’s report Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy, presented twelve technologies as potentially economically disruptive, indicating its possible impact on two categories: groups, products and resources; and pools of economic value. Four of them caught my particular attention, as I consider they should raise some concerns related to how they can increase the gap between people with access to certain resources and the ones without them. I will separate them in two categories: the mobile internet; and the automation of knowledge work, advanced robotics and 3D printing.

The mobile internet – or the empowered vantage

Access to internet and web presence can make a significant difference: more income, more resources for education, and more opportunities. A clear example of that is that it has been proven that being online; furthermore, having a good online reputation increases the demand on mostly every business [1], and by that generates more revenue for its owners.

Although access to this resource can potentially bring a variety of benefits, without a proper training and guidance, people will never realize its full potential.

The automation of knowledge work, advanced robotics and 3D printing – or replacing the manufacturing workers

This is an undeniable trend: many tasks formerly performed by humans are being automated and people are being replaced. While this fact might mean a cost reduction for a company, it is tied to a social impact, as people will potentially lose their jobs. In a perfect world, the employees would not be fired, but reassigned to positions that bring more value to the company, and require human skills that automation cannot replace. However, this would also imply further training and a more developed skillset of the mentioned workers.

Painting the current picture: a Latin American perspective

The changes I presented earlier converge on this: technology can have a significantly negative impact in societies without a democratized access to resources. I would like to create awareness around a specific one: the inequality gap widens when the resource in question is a proper education.

If we look how Latin America is doing on higher education, what we can find is very concerning numbers: less than one third of the population between 17 and 24 years is enrolled in post-secondary education [2]. This ciphers are even worse in Brazil, where it is below 20% [3].

Allying forces to empower people

It is true that governments are accountable for its people’s access to quality education, but this does not mean that they are the only agent that could take an active role in education. We also have to consider the fact that the scope of the changes they are able to execute take some time to produce an actual impact. On the other side we have private universities. They play an important role, but are almost exclusively for the ones that can afford the tuition. Who else could generate a tangible impact when it comes to education?

There is an interesting combination that has not yet been exploded: allying non-profits and businesses. How could this work? Many big companies have citizenship policies that shape their contribution with local communities. This efforts exist individually, and although they do generate impact for the people they work with, its scope is very narrow compared to what they could potentially achieve in a joint effort. Acting together, they can open the possibility of empowering people by training them in the use of leading, cutting edge technologies. And here is where NGOs could play their part. They could act as the bridge that connects those isolated efforts and put them together to reach more and more people. They can achieve a multiplying effort by making separate agents work together for a common goal.

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[1] Anderson and Magruder, Does Yelp Affect Restaurant Demand?. Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics, University of California.

[2] Only 32.8% of Mexico’s population between 19 and 23 years are enrolled in higher education (Secretaría de Educación Pública: Sistema Educativo de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Principales Cifras Ciclo Escolar 2011 – 2012). In the case of Peru, 31.3% of women and 28% of men (INEI: PERÚ: Tasa de matrícula a educación superior de mujeres y hombres de 17 a 24 años de edad, según ámbito geográfico, 2013).  

[3] In Brazil, only 14% of women and 18% of men between 18 and 24 years do (IBGE: Uma análise das condições de vida da população brasileira 2014).

In the crosshairs of mega trends

In the article, “The Importance of Frugal Engineering”, the authors highlight the relevance of frugal engineering in developing products for lower to middle income niche markets. The emphasis on reducing ‘non-essential’ cost while creating sustainable value for consumers in emerging economies brings to the fore an important question: To an outsider, social innovation presents very lucrative opportunities in these markets but in the face of rural-urban migration, can rapid technological change upend the associated benefits of simplified, tailor made products in emerging economies?

For many developing markets, shortcomings in many sectors such as education, healthcare, energy, ICT among others mean human-centered design thinking is more critical than ever in innovating products for those at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). The relative non-mature nature of such mass markets coupled with fast paced growth indicates a future rise in technology dependency. The April 2015 McKinsey book excerpt on “The Four Global Forces Breaking all Trends” puts into perspective the rise of new global cities, particularly in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and the increasing number of elderly people in urban centres.

A lot of innovative solutions that solve a particular challenge that target the BoP are designed for non-urban settings as exemplified by case of the water treatment plant for a semi-rural community near Hyderabad, India. As younger people move to larger cities for educational purposes or for jobs (whether in the formal white-collared sector or the non-formal services industry), they potentially replace an aging workforce. At the same time, they leave behind in villages and hamlets, older folks who may not have the physical capacity operate innovations in critical areas like mechanized agriculture or bioenergy. Naturally, this creates new cultural shift in the development of design thinking paradigms. In the global social innovation community, how do we strike a balance between frugal engineering in cities that are fast catching up with mature market technologies and the maintenance regimes or sustainability of installed technologies in rural locations? In the pursuit of the public good, social entrepreneurs could draw on lessons from past failures of some well-intentioned development and non-profit projects that did not maximize sustainable value despite employing ‘cross-functional teams’, ‘bottom up innovations’ and chalking a few anecdotal successes.

The disruptive dynamics of the modern globalized economy through uneven trade and geopolitics might mean that novel technologies could end up not having a significant impact even in more mature markets. The complexities the world faces today makes the role of positive deviance in social innovation less significant than before. Frugal engineering may drive innovation up to a point but without stronger institutional arrangements in emerging economies that systemically consolidate policy and regulation, problem-specific design thinking could still be susceptible to the fast changing landscape called globalization. That said, I think human-centered design thinking a good starting point to further understand social innovation and how its impact dramatically improves the needs of a segment of society. In my opinion, it is especially applicable in mobile-based technologies for social ventures in emerging regions where the rate of ICT adoption (through cell phone usage) has outpaced economic growth.

What are your thoughts?

Frugal engineering to address modern global forces

McKinsey Global Institute’s The four global forces breaking all the trends lays a foundation for readers to consider four major trends that are and will continue to shape the modern world; economic activity shifting towards the eastern and southern parts of the world, technology accelerating at an exponential rate, world population increasing at a slower rate, and an expanding global connection. These four forces propose opportunities and challenges for social innovation. 

In parallel with the benefits to rapid economic growth, growing pains are undeniable, particularly when culture and values become compromised at the expense of rapid economic growth. The following article, http://www.ibtimes.com/effects-rapid-growth-economy-chinas-booming-fast-food-culture-takes-its-toll-health-photos-1155083, illustrates the consequences of rapid-growth Chinese economy in fast food culture. Gina Kennedy of the Food and Agriculture organization quotes, “What we are seeing in developing countries, which are undergoing rapid economic transition is undernutrition, overnutrition and infections and chronic diseases coexisting over long periods of time”.  Despite the figures that China’s GDP has doubled between 2005 and 2009, the obesity count multiplied from 18 million to 100 million, with a drastic disparity between those with too much to eat, and those with not enough. The high intake of protein with fat and sugar is relatively new for the local diet.

The fast food adoption in developing countries is an example of the negative consequences of substituting western trends into eastern countries, and a failed opportunity at social innovation. In this case, it is taking a good from a developed country and placing it in a developing space by stripping away the original fancier qualities, without consideration for the true needs of the community.  The strategy + business’s article titled “The Importance of Frugal Engineering” discusses the principles behind the benefit of maximizing values and minimizing nonessential costs. When inexpensive products or items are built, they tend to be built from existing design or components to be made cheaper. The article argues that frugal engineering instead uses design thinking to identify and address from the bottom up the true needs of the users, as opposed to simply cutting down the existing over-engineered products. In the case of fast food, design thinking can be applied to observe the actual dietary needs of the people (particularly those under-nutritioned), or innovate creative approaches to adopting healthier food alternatives at lower costs. In a world where consumer wants often drive what suppliers provide, it is difficult to balance users’ self-directed actions and what research observation may in fact show. Moving forward, how do we find a healthy balance between the two? 

The Normality of Bad Design

Brown and Wyatt’s article on “Design Thinking for Social Innovation” detailed several examples where an innovation was enacted on a community, but was not being taken advantage of in a meaningful, impactful way. For example, a family continued to fetch water daily from an unsafe well despite there being a nearby, affordable water treatment facility. From a high-level viewpoint, it seems unbelievable that families in the community would not use the water facility. However due to the rigid parameters surrounding how much water the family had to take from the facilities, the water containers, and the payment process for that water, the family’s needs were misaligned with the design of the facility. Design thinking is about considering how systems, innovations, and structures actually fit on a practical level into lives of the people who are intended to use them.

Because social innovations are innovations that are directed for the improvement of society versus an investor’s pocketbook, it is especially true that a human-centered design process be considered in the implementation of an idea. Within that process, designers consider the needs of the users (the society who is benefiting) along with any other data that may influence the effectiveness of the proposed system. Those influences could be cultural barriers, internal budgetary restraints, or any other issue that needs to be mediated within a design solution. When this process is skimmed, skipped, or slighted, people suffer and problems perpetuate.

Bad design is a lack of empathy and a waste of resources! I can only imagine the frustration of the family who continued to drink unsafe water because the local water facility had inflexible policies. Conversely, the water facility is a wasted resource since it was established as a social innovation and fails to perform that duty. Unfortunately, bad design is so prevalent in our lives that we tend to shrug and think “That’s just way things are.” Most people are not consciously aware of the ways bad design inhibits their life. Even the keyboard layout I am using right now to type this blog post is slowing me down.  How do we find ways of reminding people that bad design exists unnecessarily? I propose that the definition of innovation could also include modifications to an existing system, a reconsideration of the design to encompass the habits and lifestyles of the people who use it or would like to use it but are currently unable. It may be the subtle change in design that could elevate an ineffective system to a world-changing innovation.

A Shift in the Capitalist Mindset

In the United States, when we think of goods and services designed for low-income and impoverished individuals and communities, we tend to think of stores like Walmart—a prime example of US capitalism. Walmart produces things cheaply and sells them at a low cost and has created a booming business doing so. However, anyone who has shopped at Walmart may know that the goods are almost always of a poor quality. In such a consumption-driven society, we are used to just throwing things away and buying new things when they break. When it comes to designing products for people without money, because these communities are not profitable, there is no attention paid to what their desires and needs are. I believe that this highlights an important mindset that requires changing if we seek to design products, policies, or technologies to help impoverished communities. In “The Importance of Frugal Engineering,” Sehgal, Dehoff, and Panneer discuss how people in poverty have specific needs just like anyone else, and they have necessities and desires that may be different from yours or mine.[i]

Sehgal et al. explain how the very capitalist-style market we have cannot work in creating low-cost—but efficient, effective, and high quality—products for people in poverty in developing markets. Processes and products developed in the US are not necessarily transferable to developing markets, not only because of cost and price, but also because of the needs of the people in those communities. The article describes the Nano created by Tata Motors. Tata Motors was not rooted in an assembly-line kind of production and frame of mind, which allowed them to develop a unique automobile for low-income people. This is in contrast to companies such as Ford that are so ingrained in their processes that they are unable to shift from a top-down to a bottom-up, individualized approach to production.

Frugal engineering is based on the same fundamentals as human-centered design, which requires understanding the environment in which one is working or innovating, understanding the needs, abilities, and resources of the people and businesses there, and building a completely unique process from the ground-up. However, the older businesses and companies become, the more they become set in their ways, which Sehgal et al. mention. Is it possible for existing companies to create goods and services via human-centered design and frugal engineering, or do these theories rely purely on new, young businesses? Ideally, if these innovative approaches to thinking and creating could be adopted by existing companies, governments, and individuals, we could create unique policies and products that are much more effective and useful to the communities and people in question. Are all businesses, policies, and technologies doomed to become hardwired like the Ford Model T?

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[i] Sehgal, Vikas, Dehoff, Kevin, & Panneer, Ganesh. (2010). The Importance of Frugal Engineering. Strategy + Business. http://www.strategy-business.com/article/10201?gko=24674.

Disruptive Innovation - The Key to a Sustainable World

                

As I reflect on the article, 'Disruptive Technologies: Advances That Will Transform Life, Business and the Global Economy', I want to introduce you to what disruptive technology means and why adopting it is imperative to our future. Coined by Harvard Business School professor and innovator Clayton Christensen, disruptive technology by definition is the idea of adding significant value by creating new markets that are radically different from existing ones. While this is not limited to social innovation alone, embracing disruptive technologies to implement social change will prove to drive positive impact that far outweighs the costs incurred in adopting it.

The case discusses a few such technologies in the energy and machine learning domains whose potential impact cannot be understated. The field of robotics has come a long way since the 1960's when robots were used to perform tasks that were limited to lifting and operating machinery that was too heavy for humans, to the present age when they can compute and learn dynamically based on their own prior actions. The advent of this evolution of robotics has a multitude of applications including operating in mines and other hazardous areas where humans would otherwise be exposed to harmful chemicals, in space exploration (who among us did was not amazed by TARS and CASE from the movie 'Interstellar') and other applications where human emotion poses a significant threat. 

In a planet where constantly increasing consumption is resulting in radically depleting energy supply, the possibility of energy storage devices being adopted by the automobile industry across the planet will not only mean cheaper and more cost effective ways to commute, just think of the impact it will have on reducing the carbon footprint. Similarly, 3-D printing will play a significant role in shaping consumer demand. With the possibility of volume production resulting in 3-D printers moving from an industrial model to a consumer-centric model looming large, consumers can potentially build customized products that can help building houses for the homeless extremely reasonable.

As we grow and increase in number, it is of prime importance to evolve constantly as a species - to take risks in moving from incremental towards radical innovation and adopt technology as a friend. As I close this case on disruptive innovation, it is clear that my stance lies firm in the need to be disruptive. And as we look to the future, will the need for disruption cease to exist as a choice and become a necessary beast? 

The Future of Social Innovation and Neurologically-Based Measurement Tools

As we conclude our last week’s curriculum we will discuss “The Future of Social Innovation and Enterprise.” I would like to engage in a discussion related to this week’s theme by guiding my assessments and predictions of the future of social innovation through a focused discussion on measuring a country’s social progress. Ariel Schwartz, writes an article titled, “Forget GDP: The Social Progress Index Measures National Well-Being,” which presents a challenge to GDP as a sufficient measuring tool to evaluate a country’s well-being and social progress. Schwartz suggests a new, innovative measurement tool called the Social Progress Index to supplement, or replace, GDP measurement tools.

Overall, the Social Progress Index measures a country’s social and environmental outcomes directly, and measures each outcome’s subcomponents, and specific outcomes of those subcomponents. For example, “health and wellness” is considered a subcomponent of an environmental outcome, and a specific outcome of “health and wellness,” is measured by “life expectancy, obesity, cancer death rate, or other factors.” A country’s composite score that takes into account the main outcomes of society and the environment, and provides a comprehensive assessment of the country’s overall well-being and social progress.

I am intrigued by supplementing GDP with the Social Progress Index; research supports the notion that GDP is limited in its ability to fully quantify and evaluate the idiosyncrasies in the outcomes of society (e.g., societal or environmental). I look forward to continued innovation in the creation of measurement tools that more comprehensively and deeply evaluate factors in a country that impact the country’s growth, well-being, development, and overall progress.

As someone with a background in psychology and neuroscience, I look forward to measurement tools that capture societal progress and impact by additionally including individuals’ cognitive and neurological development. GDP and Social Progress Indexes are rudimentary measurement tools that fall short of providing the deepest and most comprehensive measurement of human development and progress in comparison to a tool that also evaluates an individual’s cognitive and neurological development.

Both cognitive and neurological developments are at the core of what defines humanity and its developmental progress. In other words, economic growth, growth in basic needs, opportunity growth, physiological well being, and others, are indicative of the overall progress or well being of a country and its residents because these measured outcomes indicate a more efficient framework that facilities a greater capacity for any particular individual to develop cognitively and neurologically.

In a more ideal society in which GDP is “through the roof,” any particular individual is economically satisfied, physiologically healthy, has all basic needs satisfied, has access to every opportunity, will this individual seize to develop and progress? Of course not. In this case, the previously mentioned outcomes lay a framework for this individual to continue developing; where all that is left to develop is the individual’s cognitive and neurological capacities; thus the penultimate stages of human development. I’d say measuring these outcomes would be the future of social innovation.

What do you think?

Source: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681830/forget-gdp-the-social-progress-index-measures-national-well-being

Social Innovation or Good idea?

In the article,  “African Entrepreneurs Deflate Google’s Internet Boom Idea,” it showed how great ideas are not enough in social innovations. Social innovations rely on a combination of several interlocking parts to make the overall social innovation. Google came up with an awesome idea that was created in a lab halfway around that they thought would make a major difference in the everyday lives of people on Africa. The article said, “that from what we’ve seen, there are huge swaths of people who don’t have connectivity.” If you look at data, it shows that there is a large number of people on the continent without Internet connection. The simple solution would be to give them Internet. So that is what Google did, it came up with an awesome idea to make Internet more accessible.

Google created a solar powered balloon that would deliver Internet to people who do not have it. It sounds wonderful almost revolutionary, but was the process well thought out? This was the question that was explored in grave detail in the article. It really showed how Google’s great idea had limited capacity in some or most of the communities. In order to log on to the Internet, you need a device that would allow you to access to the Internet. Google’s idea is a little before its time. It is basically an airplane before the Wright Brothers.This is why the concepts we have been discussing in class are so important. Many of the problems with their model could have been identified if they would have focused on a more human centered design aspect. 

The objective of social innovation is to maximize social impact and in order to do that, one must understand people’s problem. A problem in the US may not be a problem in a country like Kenya. This is why human centered design is one of the focal points throughout the course because tailored made solutions maximize social impact. Ideas are formulated all the time, but social innovations make impact. The steps from ideas to being social innovations rely on concepts like human centered designed, government policies and sustainability. Google failed to answer all three of these concepts. What is the Internet balloons value to people without it? Are there any government restrictions on balloons in are and in the airspace? How financially and physically sustainable are the balloons that would be over the continent of Africa? All three of these questions are key to determining if the Internet balloon could be a social innovation. Formulating good ideas is nice, but actually adding value to society is even greater. In conclusion, how do we close the gap between ideas and social innovations? How do we help insure an aid social innovators in making sure they don't follow what google did?