An Innovation Fair!

Writing from the World Bank Innovation Fair, in Cape Town, South Africa. We are on Day 2 and just finished a Panel discussion on 'Scaling Innovations'. A favorite topic of course!

A quick background on this event: The World Bank Development Marketplace has been taking ideas to action for the last 10 years. The Development Marketplace is holding the first of a new generation event - the Innovation Fair on Moving Beyond Conflict and Fragility. The event is tied to the 2011 World Development Report and draws on a pool of innovative solutions collated through an online competition that invited applications, got users to vote and shotlist social impact ideas.

This Innovation Radar registered 2000 users, produced 223 project applications from 40 countries. 50,000 users viewed and engaged with the ideas online - and a final 30 social impact ideas were shortlisted and invited to Cape Town for the Fair. These ideas can be reviewed by clicking here.

You will note that these ideas have come from regions such as Sierra Leone, DR of Congo, Kenya, Burundi, SA, other African countries - and also from Columbia, Srilanka, a few from India. In some of these countries, the existence of conflict and the fragility of the communities is a very real scenario. And most of the ideas directly focused on how technology and innovation can be applied to empower, equip, build economic opportunity in such a context.

Egbe Osifo-Dawodu from the World Bank Institute wrote a great piece on why the subject of moving beyond conflict and fragility is relevant - and why this forms the basis of the innovation fair.

The ideas were collated and presented around 2 broad themes:

1. Improving Service Delivery and Governance through the use of Communication Tools
2. Innovative Research and Practical Approaches to Conflict and Violence Prevention

The application of Communication Technology forms a thread across many of the ideas - and while several of the ideas are in initial prototypes, a few have also created a fair amount of impact in more advanced pilot stages.

A few core themes have run through the discussions over the last two days:

• The role of the government in conflict areas to support innovation
• How do you scale beyond the initial pilots
• How do you sustain some of the ideas and get community really involved in owning and taking them forward..
• Role of institutions like the World Bank in supporting the social innovators...etc

Some of the discussions and quick excerpts of all the different presentations are accessible at the following link http://innovationfair.ning.com/

My comments on the Panel discussion on Scaling Social Innovations were really around the core thought that it is possible to 'Design for Scale' - rather than 'hope that the idea will eventually scale'... Given the nature of early stage innovations being discussed, shared 3 key thoughts around scaling...

• The notion of Innovation: Its not about the initial breakthrough idea - but about a series of ideas, which when layered together create significant impact. This usually involves innovations around the product, service model, revenue model, operation models etc, all combined together. Examples such as the evolution of pre-paid services on mobile phones that created a layer of a service and revenue model over the base mobile technology to make mobility accessible to millions of people. Without this extra layer of innovation - mobile phones would be limited to very few people. So the notion of innovation asks: What is that set of ideas that makes your core proposition strong and relevant?
  

• The role of the innovator: If the above is true then scale is built into the notion of Innovating, especially since the innovator needs to build a cohesive set of ideas that make a proposition work. This means that its important to start finding ways to succeed in creating the impact, incorporating many more simple solutions as the idea slowly takes shape... and find ways to have many people adopt your idea, thus creating a natural pull for your idea. The innovator has a role to play in building the core idea from the simple workability of the idea, through acceptability and adoption - and finally to a model that demonstrates the scalability of the model and its impact. Which stage is the implementation of your idea in right now?
  

• The role of the Ecosystem: And here come organizations like the World Bank, Ashoka Foundation etc - who have the capacity to facilitate collaborations, provide initial funding, exposure, learning for the innovator and his/ her team, help evaluate and provide a global platform for sharing, cross learning and fostering partnerships - that can give the social innovator speed. The most core resource is of course the funds. But its critical for Social Innovators to treat the funds as Working Capital - and not funding. Thus designing the models for sustainability very early on in the life cycle.
  

We talked through examples in India such as ITC eChoupal, SMSOne, Akshaya Patra that have approached scale in a structured manner.

A great example of a sustainable social impact model in a conflict environment presented itself right here at the Innovation fair!! The Social Media team anchoring the event - RLabs or Reconstructed Living Labs - is a beautiful idea that identifies disadvantaged youth, builds capability in them to use and apply technology and social media - and then finds a market for these skills and create economic opportunities. Was great to see them in action at the fair - you can see more on the work of the RLabs by clicking here.

Micro Entrepreneurs say go beyond News, Facilitate Market Access...

Bagmari, Ultodanga, Bhaghajatin are slum areas in North & South Kolkata - populated with several thousand enterprising, independent micro-entrepreneurs.

Vegetable vendors who buy Rs.1500 worth of vegetables every day from wholesalers and sell it at a net profit of Rs. 150-200 per day.

Egg vendors who procure 1000 chicken eggs per day at approximately Rs. 2500 and sell for a net profit of Rs. 160 per day.

A family of potters who procures the clay for Rs. 6000 per truck - that lasts them 15 days, making 1000 small Diya's (earthen lamps) per day. The family earns a net profit of around Rs. 200 per day for the sale of these Diya's. Everyone in the family works on this.

Small stitching units that produce hosiery vests, children's clothes for the local markets - producing up to 50 dozen sets with a 2-3 member stitching team. Net profit per day for the business owner approx Rs. 350 per day

These are micro- entrepreneurs. Each running simple, very relevant local businesses - providing for their families through the business and in some cases also providing jobs to a few more.

In studying this ecosystem, we found some interesting initiatives that are keen to formalize this section of entrepreneurs - and create more economic and capability impact.

For example an enterprising News Service has been initiated in this area of Kolkata for the last 2 years to build a flow of news that can enable these micro entrepreneurs to share knowledge and build capacity - and therefore increase incomes. Supported by an international News Agency, that is keen to further the impact of News in disadvantaged communities - this project publishes a local newsletter distributed to the micro entrepreneurs.

Printed twice a month, Amar Khabar is populated with stories of success, little tips on new business ideas, info on loans - all collated by 'young citizen journalists' from within the same micro-entrepreneur communities.

In its 24th edition when I met the team in March 2010 - this newsletter now reaches 102000 entrepreneurs within north and south Kolkata, free. With a validated database of 5000 readers, the team is now putting all efforts behind building a strong repository of reader data - such that more specific inputs and info can be provided - and the black box of 'who are the micro-entrepreneurs' can be opened.

Its a valiant effort at somehow formalizing the information, learning and knowledge flow for entrepreneurship - within a highly fragmented, disorganized and dynamic community.

Impact?

Meet Gopa Bhattacharya, a middle aged serial entrepreneur who runs a small eatery, makes Bindi's for local women, and makes and sells an odd assortment of simple products.

She read an article in Amar Khabar that provided tips on how to make and sell solar lamps. She went to Barabazaar, got all the key parts needed, made her first solar lamp 2 months ago. She now makes and sell 5 such lamps each week. For a profit of Rs. 200 per lamp. In the last 8 weeks she has augmented her income by Rs. 6000 by building a completely new product line! This reiterates the power of knowledge. Make it accessible. And the enterprising person will find a way to use it and flourish.

But for Gopa to grow beyond this, she says she needs the obvious - market access. As a woman she cannot travel beyond her community - but she knows that at her price point she can produce a lot more by hiring a couple more people - but where can she sell it?

More income would mean more 'poonji' that can be generated (working capital), which would mean lesser loans from money lenders and MFIs. But how does she get access to markets?

So at Version 1.0 - This News project has succeeded in demonstrating the immediate potential of this idea. But for large scale impact the 'Gopa effect' has to be wide spread and critical mass of real financial impact created in the micro entrepreneurs business. Either top line - or savings in costs or new product lines...and several of these.. Repeatedly you hear the request for a MARKET for the products. "Find us a market, connect us to the markets....we will find a way to produce more..."

The fact is that the producer will need to find his/ her own market. But what or who can facilitate that? What's the capability needed for that?

Should version 2.0 of such a Newsletter go beyond 'Knowledge & Capability' and become more of a bridge between the sellers and the buyers maybe? The reader base needs to include both sellers and buyers, producers, aggregators and consumers. Clearly the newsletter would need to shift its paradigm - from providing access to News to becoming a platform and interface for business impact - powered by relevant knowledge and strong database of active readers.

There are around 1.5 - 2 million such micro entrepreneurs in Kolkata. Even at a price of 0.50 paise per successful connection between seller and buyer, A Newsletter could find ways to be sustainable. At a low cost of Rs. 1 per edition that helps build the capability and provides learning to its readers...it could be more sustainable. Combine that with SMS coverage to a dedicated subscription base - and access for whole sellers...more sources for generating funds to stay alive.

The innovation challenges to building version 2.0 of such a News Service?

• How to institutionalize the 'Gopa process' of enterprise and risk taking across a larger community?
• Making content creation a far more collaborative effort - can mobile phones be leveraged to collect, write and collate news and content?
  
• How to build a knowledge chain that meaningfully links producers, consumers, buyers, sellers - in a manner that direct economic impact is possible to measure?
  
• Can this be a 'lifecycle' engagement for micro entrepreneurs - or should it be limited to providing connects and news
  
• How can available technology be integrated across the network - mobiles phones, field devices already used by large FMCGs in these markets, local phone booths.

Meeting the micro-entrepreneurs and seeing the impact of the News flowing through - led me again to the thought: There are great ideas out there, good prototypes being implemented. The initial ideas are often supported through philanthropic funds.

But to make them sustainable - what's needed is to build the next level of solutions if real impact has to be brought to economy and life in India...that's where innovation is needed. To go beyond the prototype.

If you know of some well scaled models that focus on increasing the economic success of micro-entrepreneurs and use technology and business models for this - do pls write in. Would be great to study and learn from them. Will help cut the curve immensely!

Another interesting news service I learnt of - HIBR.me in Lebanon.

Education...on a full stomach and nutritious meal!

Had an opportunity to explore and briefly immerse in the work of Akshaya Patra - a programme that provides food to over 1 million children in India. Now feeding 11,98,206 children everyday!

Millions of children in India don't get enough food for them to have any motivation or energy to really attend school or 'engage with learning'. Different studies put the number of children missing school because of lack of adequate food ranging from 7 million to 40 million across India.

Akshaya Patra focuses on this group of children. Through a range of public private partnerships, several schools now benefit from a very organized, nutritious mid-day meal.

What differentiates the Akshaya Patra effort from several other 'feeding children' initiatives is really how they have dealt with the size of the problem. By designing and engineering highly replicable, standardized processes. Spread across 8 states in India, accessible through centralized and decentralized kitchens, this non-profit organization is looking to reach 5 million children by 2020.

This mission is powered by some very large scale planning. A quick look at some numbers and the size of the operations, just in one kitchen!




The Kitchen on the Kanakpura road, Bangalore:

• Designed on the simple principles of gravity - this kitchen is a highly effective, eco-friendly operation that uses renewable fuel (husk based fuel) and recycles a large part of its waste
• Feeds around 100,000 children everyday. Plus Old people, expecting mothers and the local jail
  
• The kitchen cooks approx 6000 kgs of rice and 12,000-20,000 litres of sambhar/ dal (lentils) everyday
• Procures 5000 kgs of vegetables and 8000 litres of yogurt everyday
• Stores approximately 270 tonnes of rice for a month provided by the FCI for the mid day meal...apart from that procures rice for the BBMP scheme to feed old people in the communities
• Around 250 members work within this kitchen in 2-3 shifts starting at 3 am and going on till 6.30-7.00 pm
• People from local communities are employed in the kitchens - generating employment and building training and skills in cooking, hygiene, production, distribution..
  
• Over 3000 employed across all kitchens in India
  

Getting a hot nutritious meal to over a million children everyday is no mean feat! A brilliant example of achieving 'Scale' in social impact - comparable to any factory model for food production and distribution, Akshaya Patra has taken the job of cooking and distributing food to disadvantaged communities to another level of seriousness. Its engagement with the government at a regional level and ability to manage a diverse set of stakeholders in ensuring that healthy food reaches children and the needy is another aspect of its incredibly quiet but effective style of working.

Next level of innovation sensitive areas - community engagement, several million more children, scale out and scale up - get more education and nutrition based organizations to adopt the principles that are working here, building significantly enhanced nutrition in simple meals...so much more..

Presenting at the World Bank FPD Forum 2010

The World Bank Financial and Private Sector Development Forum 2010, this year focuses discussions on 'Getting Back to Business'.

Ted London and Parvathi Menon present a framework and talk on ‘How can the Private Sector Take Base of the Pyramid Opportunities to Scale’.

Given the data, statistics and opportunity available, it makes intuitive sense for business organizations to engage in building enterprises that have the capacity to leverage and maximize the potential of the immense markets at the base of the pyramid.

Social enterprises have attempted to create inclusive, wholistic models that are mutually ‘value-creating’ – both for business entities wanting to leverage these growing markets, and stakeholders within the BoP ecosystem – who would also gain positively from these initiatives.

Several pilots and a few scaled models down this road, the key questions are now around the critical challenge of designing social enterprises for scale.

With live examples culled from work done with organizations in India, this presentation aims to provide insights from within corporate entities that have managed to ‘scale’ their social enterprises beyond the initial pilots and really create impact on business.

World Bank FPD Forum 2010, Washington DC, March 2^nd & 3^rd 2010

March 2^nd: Session 2: How Can The Private Sector Take Base-of-the-pyramid Opportunities to Scale

Speakers:

Ted London, University of Michigan

Parvathi Menon, Innovation Alchemy

Getting paid to produce electricity for the government!

Am at the Development Dialogue 2010, an annual gathering at the impressive Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship in Hubli, North Karnataka. This is designed as an intersection of social initiatives being funded by the foundation and several international social entrepreneurs, consultants, business leaders all coming together for a few days each January to work through the key issues concerning the sustainable scale and growth of socially relevant initiatives.

Amongst all the discussions, the one that stands out is the Micro-Hydro community based electricity production in Indonesia. Tri Mumpuni, an Ashoka Fellow and well known activist in the subject of sustainable electrification of rural communities shared the model she and her team have evolved in Indonesia.

The challenge? Over 105 million people in Indonesia still live without electricity. The government has tried large hydro plants - but it violates human rights and often irreversibly damages the ecology. Several small initiatives have tried local micro-hydro plants - but these are not sustainable. As soon as subsidized state run power comes in, these small community initiatives fizzle out. The problem still remains - because state run electricity, supplied off a central grid has its own challenges of sustainability, especially in remote, rural areas.

The People Centered Economic and Business Institute, partnering with local communities has created a series of micro-hydro solutions. And they found a way to succeed! The trick is:

- Build the capability and skills within the community to run and manage the micro-hydro plant, including the technical details of running the plant. If the community is unwilling to learn and take ownership - Mumpuni and her team just don't take it on.

- And - more importantly - build an agreement with the central state grid to buy the excess power generated from these small installations!

And by implementing a connection between the off-grid local system and the central grid, the provision of rural micro-hydropower (MHP) plants has now become an economic investment activity!!.

Through cooperative dialogue the community decides how to leverage the income it is generating - Voila! And now the income from these micro-hydro plants is enabling better health, more education and sustainability of the communities. And it chooses to continue using the local off-grid system long term, instead of completely shifting to the central grid.

The by product of this approach is also the protection of the environment - its become critical to ensure trees are protected, water is saved and harvested, catchment areas are kept healthy - because it is all now an economic investment and is helping the community build and grow.

What started initially as a government approval only for IBEKA facilitated MHPs, Tri Mumpuni and her allies got the government to agree in 2002 to buy all small scale power generated from such off-grid systems in Indonesia. It probably required tons of lobbying over several years - but the impact today is a highly sustainable model that connects local, off-grid electricity production to economic opportunity in an ecologically responsible manner.

The United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) adopted this as a Public Private Partnership model in the Asia Pacific region. The People Centered Economic and Business Institute is now taking its extensive learning from Indonesia and in partnership with organizations across other countries is advocating the need for good governance to build sustainable models through the Electricity Governance Initiative.

Dream-a-Dream

Friday afternoon 4.30 pm. Children from Ananya Shikshana Kendra and Makkala Jagriti are getting together at the SPT Sports Academy, Bangalore to play a friendly football match. Dream-a-Dream, a Bangalore based Civil Society Organization, facilitates the match for the children as a part of their sports program to build Life Skills in underprivileged children.

The kids from Makkala Jagriti are a little late - the Dream-a-Dream bus has picked them up from their school and tackled heavy Bangalore city traffic to bring them over to the Sports Academy. But when they arrive there is a flurry of reunion - kids meeting each other, colour jerseys and football studs being worn, boys and girls ready for the match - everyone excited to be outdoors, playing. The youngest child is around 6 years old all the way to senior kids from grades 8, 9 and above. The children are separated by height and age - and smaller teams are created. Each group then goes into a separate part of the field to warm up under the guidance of the team of coaches.

Ajit Gupta - the head Coach of the SPT Football programme tells me he is really excited to be doing these sessions. His team also runs 'regular' sessions each weekend where eager parents from in and around Bangalore bring their children in for Football Coaching. But Coach Ajit says working with the kids from Dream-a-Dream is energizing. The children are eager, very ready to be coached and wanting to learn and use every minute of the time they have on the field.

The senior children are formed into two teams and the rules are laid down for the match - boys and girls form part of each team. The coach tells me that the number of girls has been steadily increasing. The game gets under way - and gets into a heated mode real soon. By half time one side is clearly ahead - the other team is dejected. The coach huddles the team - and teaches them to deal with the frustration of loosing and convert it into strategy for the next half.

This is truly a life skills session. None of this can be taught in the regular academic classes. And without the support from Dream-a-Dream, the children from Ananya and Makkala Jagriti would not really have a chance to learn these critical skills of life survival - through such a fun and engaged excercise.



These life skills have the capacity of being a great leveler between regular and 'underprivileged' children. Vishal Talreja, the young CEO of the organization passionately believes in that possibility. At the end its about how well you can deal with issues, problems, situations in life - and the programmes run by his team focus on helping build that capacity through co-curricular activities.

Covering a key area of skill building their work focuses on the critical portion of the gap between an underprivileged child and his/ her ability to work with equal opportunities.




Working across several partners in Bangalore who work with underprivileged children, D-a-D is now looking to scale up their work and are struggling to determine if the scale that they want to achieve should be in terms of deeper impact or more numbers covered - or both? Given that this is a critical need area. That triggered the discussion and work with Innovation Alchemy.





They have built an amazing network of volunteers who come together to support the various activities and programmes. A small core team manages the operations and works through partner organizations and volunteers to reach over 2000 children in Bangalore. That's not a small number considering each child is in atleast one activity each week of the academic year.

As the Dream-a-Dream core Team came together last month for a 'scale-architecture' session, clearly the idea they have experimented with and fine tuned incredibly over the last 7-8 years is powerful, the operations are effective - and now its time to potentially reach 500,000 children in the next 5 years! Through a whole new service model leveraging Learning Skills Experts. The thought of being able to do that has energized the team! With a powerful fund raising base, D-a-D hopes to increase its reach and impact significantly - and also go beyond Bangalore and Mysore soon...

You can support their work by running in the Mumbai Marathon coming January. Infact you will find Dream-a-Dream at some of the biggest marathons across India, being supported by a bevy of volunteers who enjoy raising funds and giving time to this project...

Innovation Alchemy...scaling-up social enterprises

Growth is a tricky issue when is comes to the subject of creating Social Impact. In my transition from a largely corporate environment into the development sector - the definition of 'growth' and 'scale-up' stood out as a key point of difference that needed consideration...which led to the setting up of Innovation Alchemy, a firm focused on enabling growth agendas in the social impact space.

Of course, creating change and social impact is complex. People are dealing with the real challenges of poor economy, endangered ecology, lack of opportunity and lack of skills to use those opportunities and make real change possible.

In such complex scenarios, when you talk about 'growing an idea' or 'scaling an initiative' what do you focus on? How do you combine the passion needed to work hard and long in these areas - with the sharp business principles that need to be adopted for real scale.

A PRIA - John Hopkins University study in 2001 indicated that there were around 1.2 million NGOs in India - that number could well be 3 million now. Those are huge numbers by any standard - and in a largely fragmented sector, without an institutional framework to grow within.

What it essentially means is that there are hundreds of ideas out there and lots of passion, being implemented in small scale to try and impact local communities, local issues. Several of these organizations have demonstrated impact at a micro level, are great ideas - and now really need to scale-up and grow for real change to be visible. NGO's have started to transition into Social Enterprise organizations, and the issue of scaling up is becoming a loud conversation.

As a start point for the discussions is to define the intent for scaling up... what is the focus?

1. Increasing the number of 'people'/ 'communities' impacted by the initiatives? For example SKS Microfinance in India now reaches around 3 million individual customers - poor women - who have benefited from micro-enterprise loans..

2. Or Deepening the impact on the people and communities - so increasing the nature and complexity of projects and the 'comprehensiveness' of the impact. BRAC in Bangladesh has evolved since 1972 to be a huge platform of support initiatives that has the capacity to customize and provide solutions to the poor, in a very localized manner. A poor woman in the village can rely on BRAC to provide her with essential health care, education for herself and her family, business support, legal assisstance and a voice in local issues.

3. Or doing a combination of both in an attempt to stay small - but have larger impact - collaborating with a lot of partners in a sort of R&D based, franchise model for growth where others take up the idea and build it in their regions...while the core team works on a small 'lab' or core zone of impact to create newer solutions..

At Innovation Alchemy we look at these challenges up close and work with the evolving Social Enterprise Teams in their quest for growth. We apply a very collaborative, hands-on approach in our work - thus getting involved over 12-18 months in working with each team to help them design and develop scale for their organizations.