And so it begins… In just two days ways we arrive in Kenya, to begin the pilot test of the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Protocol. So you may be wondering, with Sheri Willoughby busy consulting on another BoP project for Johnson and Johnson, and Patrick and the BoP Protocol team in Africa, will the the Workshop get pretty empty? Actually, it may get more crowded than ever in here! I can’t tell you how eager we are to invite some smiling new faces in here. Toys to discover, games to learn, stories to share, dreams to awake. Stay tuned for regular updates from the field. And please, wish us luck and learning. Create often, play always. -your friends at BRINQ.

The World Resources Institute has officially launched NextBillion.net, an online community focused on the intersection of business, innovation and poverty. We were lucky enough to get an early look at NextBillion, and WRI was kind enough to quote our impressions in their press release. See for yourself! New WRI Blog Targets ‘Next Billion’ Consumers Dollars WASHINGTON, May 27, 2006 - The World Resources Institute has launched an interactive blog focusing on business’s role in eradicating world poverty. The organization hopes to position its new “NextBillion.net — Development through Enterprise” blog as “the world’s premiere online water cooler and conference room” for socially responsible business development. Previously, there have been e-mail lists for such business developers, but NextBillion.net allows development and poverty reduction to reach a new level by offering a bottom-up educational resource and threaded-discussion tool for everyone from multinational executives to small-business entrepreneurs. Representatives of companies such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Pitney Bowes, DuPont and SC Johnson (as well as many innovative individuals) have already begun posting comments and discussions on the blog. For instance, noted author Stuart Hart posted exclusive content this week detailing issues highlighted in his new book, Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World’s Most Difficult Problems. Additionally, with today’s official launch, NextBillion.net’s creators expect to quickly establish the site as the top news feed and content resource for corporations, foundations, the business-school community, poverty NGOs, development organizations, and many others. (more…)

In less than a week we hit the ground in Kenya, to begin the pilot test for the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Protocol, a multinational, NGO, and university sponsored effort to find innovation and business opportunities among the world’s poor.  Sure, we’ll spend time at corporate offices, with NGOs and government officials, but most of the time we’ll be visiting and living with people who don’t have easy access to running water or electricity, probably not phones or computers either.  So, being an MBA, I fixated right away on the most important question.

Should we bring business cards?

 “For NGOs and companies sure,” answered Bryn, one of our cultural advisors, “but to give them to people who don’t have access to communications would be pretty silly.”

Actually, business cards can be pretty silly even for someone like me, a guy who has plenty of access to communications. The business cards I receive tend to sit in my wallet or bag until a lucky few are transferred to my phone or address book.  Most of the rest just get lost.  I imagine there are hundreds tucked in little hideaways throughout my office and house, each dreaming of a day when some Indiana Jones of the stationary world will find them and comment on the novelty of their logo and daring use of a Verdana font.  And let’s not even get started on my own business cards, I’ve been looking for a way to play solitaire with those poor things for years.

So… sounds like we should say no to business cards for Kenya, right?

But let’s wait a minute here. Opportunities to ask new questions should never be overlooked, and this question, as silly as it may sound, could lead to some real innovation. Think about it.

What uses could we find in the Base of the Pyramid to help us innovate the business card, that 3.5” x 2” icon of modern business? What do you put on a business card when people can’t easily call you, much less email you?  What kind of information could make a card useful?  Or, better yet, what could be more useful than a card?

Here’s where we reach the interactive part of this article.  What innovative uses have you seen for business cards? What novel designs kept a card in your wallet or pocket for far longer than you would have otherwise?   What wacky or radical ideas do you have up your sleeve. Please share a comment below.  

To get you started, here are a few ideas the Kenya team came up with: special thanks to Justin De Koszmovszky and Duncan Duke for many of these. And for some idea generation techniques, check out the BRINQ coverage of Why Not? a Guide for Ingenuity.

Business Card Ideas:

• Directions - by foot, by bus, by bicycle, whatever way the people you meet with get around. How and by what people can get to you.
• Almanac info – phases of the moon, tides, average rainfall, temperatures, information åthat may be useful to your target
• Tools – mixture tables, recipes, rulers, table of elements, phases of the moon, rules of thumb, even paper that test soils Ph levels, anything that your target could use
• Referrals & six degrees of separation - your business card could become a customer ID card, with some careful planning you could give out a group of business cards to someone to pass on to others, with ID numbers that help track who got their business card from who.
• Tickets or coupons - fit in a punch out section on the card and people with your business card can use them to take part in discounted or free services, give them another reason to come talk to you.
• Bus fare – work out a deal with some local transportation, people with your card can get rides to come see you.  It doesn’t have to be buses either, e.g. in Saigon work out a deal with local cyclo drivers
• Postage – stick the card on an envelope and prepaid postage can be bring the contents to you
• Games – our favorite of course, little games on the back for children, or turn your business cards into collectibles , via artwork, special names or phrases
• Personal Ads – personal ads are short, why not throw one on a business card? Put whatever job hunting or match making info that can help you strut your stuff.

Your ideas? Please share them below!

Additional Links and Resources:

• Digital Business Cards - business cards that are actually little CDs (scroll down to the bottom of the page)
• Rethinking Business Cards - by IdeaBook.com, more ideas for innovative business cards
• The Business of Business Cards - why we use business cards

 

Regular BRINQ readers may have noticed a lack of posting the last couple of weeks, this is because we’ve been working overtime getting ready for the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Protocol pilot in Kenya, where we’ll be hitting the ground in just two weeks. For a quick summary of the Protocol, it answers the following question: “How can the multinational collaborate with the poor to enable new businesses and discover innovation?” The past two months have been an intense period of training in participatory techniques and immersing ourselves in the details of our corporate and NGO sponsors and partners, which include SC Johnson, ApproTEC and host of others. We’ve got a pretty impressive group of folks heading over there, intelligent with diverse experiences, but hungry for new perspectives and ideas. Much of our prep work involves understanding our own cultural accents, assumptions, and goals as well as becoming comfortable with the idea that our ignorance as much as our expertise has value and that some uncertainty just can’t be planned for. Some questions we’re already dealing with include:

• Creating local capacity vs. playing development tourist
• Best use of online resources for chronicling, communication, and idea sharing
• How to establish an in-country base camp and open idea bank, where to locate, what it looks like, when to do it, how to give it permanence
• Managing corporate/non-corporate partnerships (MNCs, NGOs, governments, universities), how to build trust
• Seeking out fringe stakeholders, how to hear the unheard, how to even find them
• Unlocking organizational viewpoints: “granting a license to imagine”, getting “experts”, both local and foreign, comfortable with assuming ignorance to create new ideas
• Translation vs. Learning vs. Creation – e.g. not just understanding Kenyans, not just becoming more Kenyan, but creating something uniquely Kenyan and American (more than the two alone)

In August we’ll be holding two idea generation workshops, one in the Nakuru district of Kenya, and one in the Kibera slums near Nairobi, bringing in folks from all walks of life, many of whom we’ll have contacted or worked with in the months before. Those ideas will then go through a business development process in the Fall for our sponsors. In October, we’ll run another workshop for the Protocol itself (here in the U.S.), folding in the pilot experiences and filling it in with more life stories and tips. All in all a very exciting time here at BRINQ! You can guarantee that we’ll be looking for innovations and toys to blog about in Kenya, so stay tuned! Additional Links and Resources: BoP Protocol Pilot Project Page - BRINQ.com - the latest info on the pilot, plans, and team The Base of the Pyramid Protocol - bop-protocol.org - the Draft and history of the protocol is available Protocol Principles - don’t have time to read the whole Protocol? Start with the Principles.

"I could use a hundred people who don’t know there is such a word as impossible"
- Henry Ford, Sr.

We admit having a bit of a fascination with Henry Ford, a man, who in our minds, was one of the world’s greatest social entrepreneurs and enablers of the common man, who also happened to become insanely wealthy to boot. How could you not be fascinated with him? When people tell us we’re nuts trying to make money working with today’s version of the comman man, the 4+ billion “poor” living in the Base of the Pyramid, we point at Henry Ford and say, "He was nuts too,"and then a moment later add, "and I’m with stupid."

However, it was Ford’s notorious dislike for "experts" that we find the most compelling:

None of our men are "experts." We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the "expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible.

Of course even Henry Ford eventually fell into this expert trap, misreading the very market he had created, but this fact doesn’t diminish the strength of his lessons, rather it amplifies it. If someone as aware as Henry Ford fell into the expert trap, what’s that mean for the rest of us?

Which brings us to the Base of the Pyramid Protocol and the upcoming field test in Kenya.

The six of us on the Kenya team are, perhaps, experts at something.

One thing we are definitely not, however, are experts on Kenya. We’re not experts on Pyrethrum, a critical crop to the communities we’re engaging. We’re not experts at development either, though we’ve had a little training in participatory techniques. Our knowledge of SC Johnson and ApproTEC, two of the projects key stakeholders, is limited too, certainly no where close to an expert level. Finally, most of us are MBAs, which business school cynics will declare as proof positive that we’ve been specifically trained to be experts at nothing at all. Going into a situation that ignorant, what possibly do the six of us have to offer?

But think about Henry Ford and answer this, which would you rather be in a conversation, the ignorant or the expert?

Our take is that it’s the ignorant who will get the most out of the conversation. After all, by definition an expert already knows everything; someone who is already very familiar with how things should be done, someone who knows the best way forward is to build upon what you already know. Why do they believe this? Because most of the time they’re right; the best way forward often is just getting better at doing the same thing. In computer science lingo this is a "greedy" approach: an easy path to the highest point is just to go up from where you’re already standing. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t help me in a hypothetical climbing competition if I’m on a hill in Wichita and my competitor is at the foot of Mt. Fuji.

So while the world needs experts to climb mountains, we argue that it’s the ignorants who get us to question what a mountain really is in the first place. I may be a great climber, but I’m not going much higher until I recognize that I need to get out of Kansas.

That is, more or less, what the first phase of the Base of the Pyramid Protocol is about, getting us off our mountains via a collision of world views: the ignorant with the expert, the local with the foreign, the "rich" with the "poor". We acknowledge that everyone is an "expert" at something; we acknowledge that everyone is an "ignorant" at something. Then we get busy, as nicely as possible, knocking each other off our respective peaks so we can collectively seek out new mountains to climb; and we level the playing field so that the expert has as much to gain as the ignorant.

How to do that best is what we’re testing in Kenya.

Safi! [Cool!]

As for Henry Ford, we believe he became a victim of his own success. It took another American icon, Alfred Sloan and General Motors, to show Ford that he was on the wrong mountain: people didn’t just want the Model T anymore, they wanted the Cadillac, and in red too.

The world had turned color, yet our foremost expert was still peddling black.

Pretty ignorant, huh?

*Please note, this author aside, the five other members of the Kenya field test team are actually quite an exceptional bunch of folks.

Past “Innovation from the Brinq” articles:
The Power of Play – 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