Here’s an opportunity to help me support an incredible organization that we’re working with here in Rio, one that is helping local communities throughout the world solve their own problems. I have agreed to become a CatComm Champion, pledging $500 to support Catalytic Communities’ unique work with community leaders around the world, but only if I can inspire at least 50 of my friends and colleagues to each contribute $50 or more to match my pledge (for a total of at least $3000).

Catalytic Communities (CatComm) creates networks of community champions who are working to better their own communities - often marginalized squatter areas - throughout the world.  A Washington, DC and Rio de Janeiro based non-profit, CatComm is building a world where community-generated solutions are just a mouse-click away, where anyone, anywhere, confronting a local problem, can find the inspiration and tools they need to implement the solution, learning from their peers.  In November I will attend the Tech Museum Awards with CatComm founder Theresa Williamson where CatComm is being honored as a Tech Museum Laureate for its development of technology that benefits humanity (see more further below).

By joining me in this pledge, you not only magnify the financial support of hundreds of other pledges, you also become a part of this growing network of people who are helping the world to help itself.  Only when 50 friends and colleagues sign up to donate at least $50 will I make my donation of $500.  I am counting on colleagues like you to join me to meet this pledge!

To sign my pledge please go to http://catcomm.pledgebank.com/stanfordcarolina, fill in your name and email address and click “sign pledge”.  When the pledge completes in December, CatComm will contact you about how you can contribute your $50.

Thank you,
Patrick

Did you know? CatComm is currently supporting over 130 community led projects in 9 countries. Dozens of community programs would not have survived were it not for CatComm’s outreach on their behalf. CatComm runs a unique community center for over 950 squatter and community leaders across Rio de Janeiro. Communities from Khartoum to Rio de Janeiro have attracted press attention for their projects through our site. Our online database exists in English, Spanish and Portuguese. To learn more about Catalytic Communities visit: http://www.catcomm.org Past BRINQ articles about CatComm: Learning to Swim - Back in Brazil Side Effects - A Day in the Community The Power of Peer Networks - CatComm and PledgeBank

October, 2006 Catalytic Communities Awarded Prestigious Tech Museum Award “The Tech Museum Awards are an incredibly important way to call attention to some of the most meaningful innovations in science and technology in the world, and to the often unsung heroes behind them,” said Peter Friess, President of The Tech [Musuem]. “The Laureates who we honor serve as great role models to future generations of inventors and engineers, and their work reminds us that innovation can be applied in profound ways to benefit humanity and the world.” “Catalytic Communities represents the ‘best of the best’ technologists whose innovations benefit humanity, and we are thrilled to welcome them into our community of Tech Laureates,” said Amanda Reilly from The Tech Museum of Innovation. “We aim to raise public awareness on how technology can significantly alleviate many of the critical issues facing our planet and champion those innovators who are leveraging technology to provide resolution to both local and global problems.” http://www.techawards.org

After five months of intense work in communities in Kenya and Brazil we’ve got a long backlog of stories to share. Now that we’ve got a short breather we thought we’d post a few. This one from Kenya came up recently when we were asked via our colleague & mentor Stuart Hart, “Have you heard of these XAccess guys?”

Actually, yes we have!

In June the BoP Protocol team headed out to the shores of Lake Victoria in Kisumu, Kenya to visit with the XAccess and KickStart folks who were modifying an innovative bicycle for the local market. XAccess is the non-profit sister of XtraCycle, maker of the world’s first Sport Utility Bicycle, and KickStart, the NGO formerly known as ApproTEC, is a long time provider of enterprise enabling technologies to low-income communities. KickStart is helping XAccess to commercialize its bicycle in Kenya as the “Bigga Boda”, an upgrade to the existing “Boda Boda” bicycle taxis, so named from their early days on the border of Kenya and Uganda where the taxi riders cries of “Border! Border!” eventually morphed into the “Boda Boda” of today.

The lead designer for XAccess in Kisumu was none other than Ed Lucero, legendary kayaker and the world record holder for the longest vertical drop in a kayak (a jaw- and stomach-dropping 106 ft over Canada’s Alexandra Falls). Ed also happens to be an incredibly talented product designer and he described to us how the XAccess kit attaches to existing bicycles, creating a larger, more rugged space for heavier cargo of all sorts while still fitting into Kenya’s existing bicycle landscape and servicescape. Ed is designing a kit which Kenya’s bicycle fundi (craftsmen and repairmen) can use to attach the XAccess frame to local bicycles. The XAccess frame is made from locally available parts and can be modified for various types of bikes.

To cap off our visit, Ed and a colleague took us on a ride around Lake Victoria, where we became the envy of all the local bicycle taxi and cargo operators. “You want to be popular?” Ed said, “just ride one of these bikes around Kisumu and you’re sure to meet lots of new friends.” Common questions we were asked on our ride were “How soon can I get one?” Soon, the program is currently in a test market phase to produce and sell 50-100 bike kits. “How much will it cost?” Not sure, perhaps 3000-4000 Ksh ($40 - $50 US). “How many people can it carry?” Three on a downhill or a straightaway, and uphill depends on the size of your calves, though three people would be tough and heavy cargo like us wazungu, Westerners, could be even tougher.

After days of riding from site to site in the KickStart van, the leisurely pace of a bicycle was a delightful reminder of how much you miss when you just motor through. And fittingly enough when our van’s tires blew out the next day on the potholed roads out of Kisumu, how did we get to the local repairman?

On the back of a bicycle of course!

Click here for more on the XAccess project in Kenya.

Also see: Bambucicletas and Other Cycles of Innovation for past BRINQ coverage.

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

 

"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

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

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!

Links:

• 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

Where should you look for the unexpected? Try finding a different world view.

"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.

(more…)

The other day, my foster brother Seth and I were speaking about being innovative. Seth is a lead test engineer on a certain eXcellent gaming console in Redmond, WA.

"I don’t think I have it in me," Seth commented, "I can almost always figure out how things work, like noise canceling headsets for example, but I don’t know how people come up with those ideas in the first place."

"Maybe that’s true," I responded, "but I bet that you could be trained."

I like to tell people that creating something innovative and new is like pulling on threads until it leads you to a sweater, or even better yet, it’s like gathering threads into your hands until you finally realize that you’re already holding a sweater. In non-knitting terms, innovation is an organic process, involving questions and observations, and a lot of looking at the world differently. And one of my favorite guides for looking at the world differently is Barry Nalebuff’s and Ian Ayres’ "Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small"

In twenty years and countless adventures in growing our business, our only progress and for that matter our only interesting breakthroughs have resulted from someone asking Why not? Nalebuff and Ayres have crafted an inspiring, imaginative, informative and best of all, fun treatise that will arouse the entrepreneur in all of us. You will fly through this book, and you will never look at a problem the same way again.

—Gary Hirshberg, President and CEO,Stonyfield Farm Yogurt, Inc.

(more…)

“No single measure would do more to reduce disease and save lives in the developing world than bringing safe water and adequate sanitation to all.”
- UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Millennium Report

How do we meet the clean water needs of the world’s billions?

Connecticut based KX Industries may have the answer.

Perhaps you never heard of KX Industries (KXI), but you probably tasted the fruits of its work, they created the technology behind the PUR and BRITA "end of tap" filters: those water purifying pitchers we all know and love. Directed by CEO Dr. Evan Koslow and investor Kevin McGovern, KXI has recently developed an exciting new water filter technology, the "World Filter". Very little is publicly available about the filter, but the company claims its "nanofiber" technology is both extremely low cost and highly effective, so much so that Cornell business professor David BenDaniel called it "magic" when presenting a business case on the company. We agree with BenDaniel’s assessment, the technology was certified against strict standards: bacterial reduction of 99.9999%, viral reduction of 99.99%, and oocyst reduction of 99.95%. The company sees huge opportunities for profit and to meet the severe water needs of people in developing markets.

As magic as the technology is though, at BRINQ we know that success in Base of the Pyramid (BOP) markets is rarely about technology alone. For instance, look at Proctor & Gamble’s failure to crack the rural water purification market (as reported in a recent Wall Street Journal article). We’ve seen many demonstrations of P&G’s PUR powder, watching the swirling powder pull dirt out of muddy water looks like magic too, but its education requirement made the powder a difficult sell:

Still, the water purifier isn’t always an easy sell, even when it is free. One problem, P&G concedes, is that the product practically needs an instruction booklet. The powder, which kills bacterial diseases such as typhoid and cholera as well as various viruses, needs to be mixed with a specified amount of water and then allowed to sit for several minutes. The clean water then must be filtered through a cloth, to separate it from any debris, before it can be consumed.

Distribution in emerging markets is a huge and costly challenge too. Add marketing, gaining local trust, combating copycats, and protecting intellectual property to the mix and you can see that even with the most magical of technologies, the solution isn’t going to be easy. Clean water is also seen by many as a medical necessity: a perception might exist that people should get it for free. Even if the government buys your product at market value before giving it away, limiting your customer base hurts the products financial sustainability. You might even destroy local jobs by cutting out potential resellers. However, we’re not sure how toxic such “philanthropic poisioning” really is, and we know of at least one great example where free can help you reach high profit margins [Aravind Eye Care].

We believe an even worse curse for multinational companies is their financial return requirements. Though we don’t know how much KXI invested to develop the World Filter technology, chances are it was a pretty significant sum. There’s an unwritten law here: the more miraculous the technology, the more R&D dollars spent, the bigger and faster you’ll need to come out the gate to meet your Top of the Pyramid returns. With those pressures, it can feel impossible to start small and grow your business organically and smartly. Organic growth gives you time and experience to learn from your mistakes, whereas a fast and furious approach means that if you fall, you’re going to fall hard.

We have a lot of hope for KXI, the World Filter technology appears to be nothing short of amazing and Koslow and McGovern employ some incredibly brilliant individuals: their technical savvy itself borders on the magical. Still, here at BRINQ we know the world needs more than just magic, if brilliance were the only missing ingredient, wouldn’t one of us billions have figured out the answers long ago?

Past “How to Change the World” articles:
Unleashing Competitive Imagination — The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid – The Model T Trap – Going Beyond Networking

A toy designer and BRINQ advisor talked to us yesterday about his recent trip to volunteer in Nicaragua. He shared a number of observations on children there:

"Kids seemed more interested in clothing than toys, we met a lot of people who were much better dressed than we were but who also happened to sleep on dirt floors. Kids wanted better shoes for playing sports and most never had a pair of tennis shoes in their life. But what every child really seemed to want was a bicycle! However, most couldn’t afford them."

If you have spent much time in developing countries, chances are you have seen A LOT of bicycles. I have very vivid memories of crossing through a river of bicycle traffic in Saigon (the trick is to walk slow and steady so they can dodge you) and seeing whole families on a single bike in central Viet Nam. Bicycles are the workhorses of many societies, and it’s no wonder that children want the freedom and mobility bikes represent.

So this got us started on the subject of innovation for bicycles in the Base of the Pyramid. Have people found ways to make bicycles more accesible and useful for the world’s poor? Here are few examples we came across (and don’t forget our previous find of a bicycle that rides on water).

Brazilian inventor, Flavio Deslandes, has invented a bamboo bicycle (Bambucicleta, pictured right):

"Bamboo is a resource of immense potential. And it is strong too. What makes it possible to build bicycles from it is that it is stronger than steel when strained in the longitudinal direction, 17% to be exact."

"This is going to be a revolution: the bicycle wheel made out of bamboo. There is steel in the assemblies of my bicycles. But unlike everything else that is made out of bamboo - for instance the furniture that you talked about - the steel used here serves the bamboo, not the other way around. I use bamboo in its natural form in the bicycle. If you start bending it, drilling holes in it or you put nails or spikes into it you’ll weaken the structure”

"But I keep on researching in order to find even more replacements for the metal parts. This wheel here is one hundred percent bamboo: Rims and hub are made out of laminated bamboo and the spokes are made out of straight bamboo sticks. I also work on being able to produce pedals and pedal arms in bamboo,” Flavio says proudly.

SSAC reports an article from the Calcutta Telegraph about Dodhi Pathak, an Indian inventor of an almost all bamboo bicycle:

"Like most of the innovators, Pathak, too was driven by necessity. He didn’t have money to buy even a second-hand bicycle, so he built a bicycle out of bamboo. Except for tubes and tyres, which are of standard rubber, the piston, handles and barrels of his bicycle are all made of bamboo."

"Pathak belongs to the breed of inventors who, without a laboratory or research infrastructure, and sometimes without a formal education even, have churned out valuable innovations. In addition to meeting their own needs, those inventions may turn into commercial products for the indian,and perhaps even global markets."

Could there be a market to sell bicycle-making kits? Import the chains, spokes, joints and extra parts and then just add your own frame from locally grown bamboo? Would it be cheaper than just importing the whole bike? We’ll have to wait to hear back from our bamboo expert before answering that one. In the meanwhile check out AfriWheels.org and why there is no bicycle that meets the needs of Africa’s poor.

Additional Stories and Links:

• Two more articles in Portuguese (but with photos) on bamboo bicycles:
  Flavio Deslandes (referenced above)
  Milton Felicissimo - another Brazilian inventor
• Pedals for Progress - recycling the millions of discarded bicycles to places that can use them
• The Bicycling Empowerment Network - promoting bicyle mobility in South Africa
• XAccess, based in bike friendly Berkeley, CA, develops low cost cargo systems for bicycles

Past "Innovation from the Brinq" articles:
Poor People’s Knowledge — India - Innovation Central — Building a Better ATM — Keeping it Cool - Clay Pot Refrigeration

"How can we help poor people to earn more from their knowledge—rather than from their sweat and their muscle? This book is about promoting the innovation, knowledge, and creative skills of poor people in poor countries, and particularly about improving the earnings of poor people from such knowledge and skills."

The World Bank’s "Poor People’s Knowledge: Promoting Intellectual Property in Developing Countries" is a collection of essays by researchers and practitioners covering the subject of knowledge development and intellectual property in the Base of the Pyramid. The book (available in PDF) is an informative and thought-provoking read. Today we touch on Chapter 2 "Handmade in India" by Maureen Liebl and Tirthankar Roy.

Handmade in India: Traditional Craft Skills in a Changing World

India’s 9.6 million craftsmen contribute an estimated $3.3 billion to the Indian economy. Crafts also provide part-time income to seasonal agricultural workers and women, a means for workers to remain in their villages rather than move to overcrowded cities, and act as archive for India’s rich cultural heritage. Handmade in India discusses the struggle of traditional crafts making in the face of more mechanized, cheaper alternatives and intellectual property problems.

"Artisans in India face the same IP problems as in other developing countries: cheap knockoffs, extensive copying among artisans, artisans who pass along (and sometimes sell) designs belonging to a client, and buyers who have a sample designed and produced in India, then manufactured in bulk somewhere else."

"Problems with enforcing ownership are particularly complex given what the artisans themselves accept as norms of behavior. Copying among artisans is a long-established tradition. Artists acquire their skills by copying."

The authors note that successful craftsmen are market-accepting individuals, who understand that societies evolve and that [outside of a museum] no craft can or should survive without a viable market. As entrepreneurs, craftsmen must seek new markets for their skills, but face four major shortcomings in doing so:

• Lack of knowledge on how to increase quality, productivity, and technical innovation.
• A constrained worldview that keeps them unaware of and an unable to access the new market opportunities available to them.
• A lack of working capital and access to credit. Even if a craftsman receives a large order, they do not have the upfront capital to fund the work and materials.
• A total lack of civic, professional, and social service infrastructures.

In the end, effective solutions to promoting and protecting poor peoples’ knowledge in India will need to account for Indian culture, community & family structures, the Indian caste system, and even deeply held beliefs about individualism: "Aesthetic forms are often thought of as springing from a kind of universal, divinely inspired subconscious." The authors suggest two types of solutions:

• Adapting traditional skills to new products for changing markets.
• Repositioning skills and products for upscale markets that appreciate and are willing to pay premiums for handcrafted quality and character.

On the flip side of a problem is always an opportunity. Organizations that offer effective methods to deal with the problems and solutions described in Handmade in India have the potential of opening up huge market opportunities in the Base of the Pyramid. Just remember that the promotion of innovation must be deeply ingrained in culture, a lesson not lost on us here at BRINQ.

Here’s a wonderful website and organization that is right up our alley, Invention at Play of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, part of the Smithsonian museum.

"The Lemelson Center is dedicated to exploring invention in history and encouraging inventive creativity in young people."

Invention at Play is both a website and a travelling exhibit, currently on display in Omaha, Nebraska and Wilmington, NC. More about the exhibit:

Invention at Play is a highly interactive, engaging and surprising traveling exhibit that focuses on the similarities between the way children and adults play and the creative processes used by innovators in science and technology. It departs from traditional representations of inventors as extraordinary geniuses who are “not like us‚” to celebrate the creative skills and processes that are familiar and accessible to all people. Visitors of all ages will experience various playful habits of mind that underlie invention.

The website includes biographies of historical and modern inventors and organizations, an interactive online play space to spark creativity, and articles and videos on the importance of play.

Invention at Play does a great job of explaining the importance of play to creativity and innovation, both in your personal life AND in your working life. This same playful spirit is at the heart of what we do here at BRINQ, so we couldn’t agree more!

“We are all too much inclined to walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all around us, and right at our very feet, that we have never seen; because we have never really looked.”
-Alexander Graham Bell