Impact Innovation
The point isn’t to create a new startup, the point is to create a culture of innovation.
Creating lasting, impactful solutions is a growing need in the world today. Many new technologies are introduced and soon after disappear, or they are made into products that often have little to no effect on the several emerging markets across the globe. At the Media Lab, we are diving headfirst into an investigation of methods to create and implement new technologies so that they not only last, but are able to impact the lives of millions around the world.
The Lab’s Camera Culture group has been a key part of this effort with their work in “crazy science.” Led by associate professor Ramesh Raskar, their projects include the development of terahertz imaging to read books page-by-page without opening them, cameras that use ultrafast imaging to see around corners, and imaging that can see through optical barriers such as darkness or fog.
Raskar has been heavily involved in bringing these advancements to emerging economies around the world, particularly in India where he was born. There, the team developed and deployed platforms such as EyeNetra, a company that provides their ground-breaking cellphone-based eye-scanning technology for optometrist-grade prescriptions. These early projects inspired Raskar to start a special interest group at the Media Lab called Emerging Worlds, which engages several researchers from the Lab and across MIT to focus on bottom-up co-innovation, working with people on the ground to create impact in developing societies across the globe.
While working with EyeNetra, Raskar discovered the dilemma that most innovators in emerging markets face: innovating to solve grand challenges and designing solutions for grand opportunities are two very different things. Solving an existing problem, technology-based or otherwise, does not guarantee that it is valuable for the population. This is often because the work is done in what Raskar calls “solver-rich” societies, where there are massive numbers of solvers who are far from the “problem-rich” areas of the world where the greatest potential for impact exists.
Innovating to solve grand challenges and designing solutions for grand opportunities are two very different things.
Creating Impact
Raskar often quotes his mentor Desh Deshpande of the Deshpande Foundation, who said that the success of a society is based on the ratio of those who tolerate, those who whine, and those who solve. An example of a successful ratio is Silicon Valley, a society that has produced several ground-breaking technologies because of its large concentration of solvers. But in most of the world, it’s impossible to recreate the Silicon Valley model. Investment in startups and accelerators in emerging economies often fails because neither the infrastructure nor the cultural values exist the way it does in the Valley. Instead, most of the problem-solving happens in incremental steps, such as is done in improving hotels.
But Raskar wants to create what he calls “Impact Innovation,” which are disruptive solutions within a problem-rich society. The idea is represented in the graph below. To reach this goal, he has developed integrated innovation ecosystems for creating impact rich solutions. These ecosystems are made up of teams who pursue several solutions in parallel, and then explore all of the options on the ground in collaboration with the society the solutions are intended for. From there, one can discover what solutions will create the most opportunity.
Innovation Ecosystems
One of these ecosystems is the LVPEI-MITra Program, which sends several MIT students to Hyderabad, India and explore various opportunities for impact alongside the LV Prasad Eye Institute. They engage with key researchers and doctors to investigate the possibilities of new horizontals that could be used across several different platforms. The core of this program avoids the common trajectories of creating a competition, a degree-program, or an accelerator as a method of incentivising a single executable innovation. Instead, the program combines all approaches with the goal of creating a “menu” of solutions, allowing the value to grow in collaboration with researchers and experts on the ground. It took three years, but Raskar and his team were able to build a sustainable platform that has succeeded in moving forward several designs with LVPEI.
Another approach started from a collaboration between MIT and several local stakeholders to address a series of problems surrounding Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage that brings over 30 million people to Mumbai over 30 days. The solutions proposed leveraged technologies such as 3D maps, crowd steering, and pop-up housing to address challenges such as lack of amenities, crowd control, and housing. The solutions were implemented by not only researchers, but also entities such as the police force and transportation authorities in a new a culture of innovation. All that were involved desired to foster this culture further by creating a one year fellowship to continue solving such problems in the same manner.
A program created for students in Indian universities was formed to engage with industrial, academic, and foundational partners in order to continue creating horizontal solutions that will transform society. The Digital Impact SQ (DISQ) became a co-inno-center in Nashik, West India, and established an integrated innovation ecosystem that creates a hybrid conversation of entities and stakeholders, much like LVPEI-MITra. It takes the best parts of existing innovation hubs around the world, and brings them into a structure that creates the most value for a problem-rich society.
Thanks to the relationships made with city officials of Nashik’s infrastructure, steps have been taken to create solutions to problems such as crime, food and agriculture, hawkers and other elements of the unorganized economy, and even maternal health (institutional delivery). They’ve considered using cheap wearables or smart objects to regulate social structures better than an organization, similar to the way that a traffic light does. In these ways and more, the teams have increasing focus on horizontal platforms for any vertical implementation to exploit to create lasting value for society.
We must think in a new way in order to create impact innovation.
Ramesh Raskar highlights the common misconceptions we have while developing new technologies: mistaking innovators for entrepreneurs, startups for centers of impact, vertical solutions for horizontal platforms, innovation for adoption, and grand challenges for grand opportunities. None of these create the other, and particularly in problem-rich societies, Raskar had to dig deeper and think in a new way to discover these grand opportunities. In the end, he and his team now have the fabric, the experience, and the foundation to move forward from innovation for cities, towards innovating for billions.
