Remember how much fun spinning around on a playground merry-go-round was when we were kids?

In our recent article, Capturing the Unexpected Innovation, we included a picture from a story we knew we had to chase down (see image right). Thankfully, just as we were looking for more, BBC News ran the article, "Why pumping water is child’s play".

"It’s a positive displacement water pump, and as the children spin around it transfers their energy into vertical or reciprocal motion, and that pumps water from an underground borehole or well to the surface where it’s stored in a tank for future use."

With the children pushing the roundabout around 16 times a minute, the play-pump can produce 1,400 litres of water per hour from a depth of 40 metres.

Developed by Roundabout Outdoors, the play pump has been installed in hundreds of locations in South Africa, with the majority of installations at primary schools (with a healthy number of "volunteers"). In addition to providing life-giving water and life-fufilling play, the roundabout’s tank also includes space for four billboards, two for public health messages and two for commercial advertising space; proceeds from the advertising go towards paying for maintenance of the pump.

International organizations such as the Worldbank and the Kaiser Family Foundation (Washington DC) see the playpump as the ideal medium to inform rural populations on the dangers of HIV/AIDS infection. Consequently a large percentage of playpump installations automatically carry HIV/AIDS messaging.

What a great example of the power of play!

Past “Innovation from the Brinq” articles:
Why Not? A Guide for Ingenuity – Discordant Notes – Bambucicletas and Other “Cycles” of Innovation – Poor People’s Knowledge – India - Innovation Central – Building a Better ATM – Keeping it Cool

Well, it looks the folks at the World Resources Institute (WRI) have put together yet another great resource for the rest of us. WRI is behind a litany of world-changing best hits, including Beyond Grey Pinstripes, which tracks business schools on the leading edge of sustainability, the Digital Dividends progam, identifying and promoting solutions to the global digital divide, the New Ventures program, investment for sustainably oriented start-ups in the developing world, and the fantastic Eradicating Poverty through Profit conference, first held last December in San Francisco.

NextBillion.net, WRI’s latest resource, was born of the fabulous community that came together for the Eradicating Poverty conference: close to a thousand aspiring and accomplished world changers, entrepreneurs and representatives of multinationals, NGOs, universities, governments, and local businesses from throughout the developed and developing world.

Rather than explain much more, I’ll just let WRI do it themselves.

Our goal is to identify and discuss sustainable business models that address the needs of the world’s poorest citizens. Linking the pursuit of profit with the goal of economic development creates a new lens through which traditional business and development models can be viewed. Through this lens, we explore the “next billion” - the next billion to rise from poverty, who are also the next billion customers currently underserved by markets worldwide.

NextBillion.net emerges from the successes of “Eradicating Poverty Through Profit: Making Business Work for the Poor,” a conference held December 12-14, 2004 in San Francisco, California. It is an opportunity to continue, and to expand upon, the relationships and conversations begun there.

Our goal is to create a new forum for the discussion of best practices, new research, and on-the-ground activities related to business engagement with low-income communities, and private sector-led development. It is a place where development professionals, business leaders, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy makers, academics, activists, and practitioners - from both North and South - can convene every day to access each other, and build on their own, and others’, work.

The site is still in beta but already has a significant amount of content. You can sign up to submit your own content or subscribe to their news feeds. Enjoy!

For those that have followed our work here at BRINQ, our efforts with the toy industry, and our focus on discovering "Innovation in Utility", the Boston Globe has an article which has gotten us really EXCITED!!! It even starts with an example from the toy industry!

Here’s a quick quote, you can find a link to the rest of the article below:

Ultimately, user-centered innovation may transform not only companies’ product development processes but also business models, turning them into the providers of innovation toolkits to users and the marketers of their innovations, [MIT’s] von Hippel suggests.

Innovation toolkits!! We definitely need to talk to this guy!

• Manufacturers learn from users’ creativity - the Boston Globe
• Democratizing Innovation Von Hippel’s new book, available online via a Creative Commons License
• Slashdot discussion - Slashdot.org - News for Nerds - Stuff that Matters
• Capturing the Unexpected Innovation - BRINQ - Innovation at Play

"the unexpected success is not just an opportunity for innovation; it demands innovation. It forces us to ask, What basic changes are now appropriate for this organization in the way that it defines its business? Its technology? Its markets? If these questions are faced up to, then unexpected success is likely to open up the most rewarding and least risky of all innovative opportunities."
- Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

At BRINQ, we believe those living in the Base of the Pyramid (BOP), the so-called poor, are a huge source for something unexpected: innovation. And particularly a type which we like to call "innovation in utility", the novel and unexpected ways in which people use technology. It’s simple really, when does your invention become a true innovation?

Somebody uses it.

Lots of somebodies, and often in a way you didn’t expect.

Look at the examples Harvard business guru Clay Christensen gives of disruptive innovations in his pathbreaking work the Innovator’s Dilemma, many of his examples’ early successes came from unexpected uses in unexpected markets. Or take a look at Cemex, which capitalized on the unexpected success of cement sales to Mexico’s poor by developing its Patrimonio Hoy program. Our colleague Gordon Enk (Partners for Strategic Change) summed it up best in a recent conversation, "I don’t think anyone ever sets out to invent a disruptive technology." We believe that’s because invention is about technology, but innovation is about utility, and it’s a near impossible task to guess all the seemingly crazy ways in which people might use your creation, even if those crazy ways determine your future failure or success.

Innovation in utility is rarely discovered inside a corporate R&D lab, rather it’s user and market focused: the more people you observe using your technology or service, the better chance you have to discover an unexpected success. Even better is to find people with an entirely different world view than your own, as they can create possibilities you never dreamed of, and then give them reasons to seek you out. We believe the Base of the Pyramid has a wealth of such perspectives and dreams that are ripe for this purpose.

We recommend two critical components to discovering innovation in utility: casting your net for innovation as far and wide as possible, through product offerings or services, and then drawing the resulting innovative uses back to you. In the remainder of this article we will focus on the second component, drawing the unexpected innovations back to you. We will do this the through the example of the MTN villagePhone venture in Uganda, a new venture which we analyzed in the Spring of 2004 on behalf of the the Grameen Technology Center and the Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab. These concepts (and our introduction of the "Model T Trap") were awarded the BOP Lab’s Best of 2004 Award.

“Ever had one of those conversations,” Stu Hart asked the crowd, “where you think you and another person are talking about the same thing, only to discover you’ve been discussing something completely different?  In my work, I run into that all the time.”

Stuart Hart is a professor at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management, recent author of the acclaimed “Capitalism at the Crossroads”, and one of the world’s foremost experts on the strategies and business opportunities for sustainable enterprises and serving the world’s poor.  Hart was co-presenting with colleague Mark Milstein (of the World Resources Institute) at Cornell’s 3rd annual Sustainable Enterprise Symposium.  

Hart and Milstein explained that there are so many different “sustainability tribes”, each using their own vocabulary of buzzwords, that even basic communication proves difficult and unwieldy; strategic planning and collaboration are even harder.  How can we collaborate in creating a better future if we can’t even communicate? 

It’s been another busy travel time for BRINQ, as we get ready for the Base of Pyramid Protocol field test in Kenya, watch Carolina regain its college basketball throne, make the leap to Apple, and build a bridge in Viet Nam with hundreds of spring rolls. Sheri Willoughby and I headed out to Cornell for the Sustainable Enterprise Symposium, hosted by the Center for Global Sustainable Enterprise and the local Net Impact club. We got to spend quality time with people whose work I respect the most, old friends Stu Hart (Cornell), Mark Milstein (World Resources Institute), Monica Touesnard (Cornell), Erik Simanis (UNC), and Valerie Cook-Smith (Citibank). New friends Claire Preisser (Aspen Institute) and Rubens Mazon (Fundacao Getulio Vargas in Brazil) also made the trip a wonderful one.

Of course, we also had to take a break in New York to watch Carolina’s Final Four victory over Michigan State, which prompted another break to watch their NCAA Championship victory over Illinois. It’s great to see how far the Tar Heel boys have come over the last 3 years, and to know that Dean Smith was in the crowd. I got to meet coach Smith briefly last year when he came to promote his new leadership book the Carolina Way, and what I remember most was how proud he was that so many of his professional players returned to finish their degrees. Go Heels!

Another distraction was the death of my main computer, an old HP Omnibook 6100, which prompted a replacement by this lovely 12" Apple Powerbook. Yes, I finally made the jump to a Mac, and only ten years after I worked at Apple (no, I didn’t own one then either). I wish I still had those discounts, but I got a pretty good deal, and Apple’s OS X is a beautiful example of great design in action.

And the final small distraction, my mother Mai Donohue threw a fundraiser to build a bridge in Duc Pho, our family’s village in Viet Nam. The current bridge gets washed away every year, which can make travel difficult and dangerous for the kids on their way to school. So we prepared a menu of grilled lemongrass chicken, fried spring rolls, chicken noodle stirfry and more, a full dinner for the fundraiser’s 300 some odd guests in Barrington, RI. "Her food is unbelievable", said fundraiser coordinator Joe Lombardi. Even when I’m a part of these mammoth marathons, even when I can see it happening, I can never understand how our mother pulls it off. A tiny 4′10", 95 lb, Vietnamese dynamo, she’s a huge inspiration to anyone that meets her, she certainly is to me. Go Mom!