Innovation: What the developed world can learn from the developing world
The following article borrows heavily from my Silicon Beach 2015 talk.
We are living in transformative age where the pace of innovation is ever increasing. Traditional business paradigms are being replaced, whether your business is in print, as a hotel, or a taxi.
The challenge we have with innovation today in the developed world is that it is designed to makes us want more. We need to look at innovation that moves away from being about consumption and that does not fetishises technology on it’s own
For that reason we need to look at the developing world for inspiration. We have become tuned into a world yet disconnected from the life around us. This lead me to question whether innovation in today’s world is having a beneficial affect on our lives.
The problem we have today is how the process of innovation has been standardised.
Broadly speaking there are 3 phases to innovation for getting a product or service out:
1. The first stage is where potential in something is realised and brought to market
2. The next stage is taking this potential and making it scale
3. The final stage is to make people want more through by changing the product or service; offering more variation of the product or service; or even building obsolescence into a product such as the printer cartridge.
A shift has taken place, where to quote Russell Davis of the UK Government Digital Service
‘…we have moved from a world of utility to a world of persuasion’.
We need to recognise that innovation is also about the friction of people and their ideas. We need to look for new ways of evaluating the output of innovation beyond making us want more stuff.
One of the greatest innovations that we are privileged to have in the UK is free, universal, healthcare in the form of the National Health Service. The purpose of the NHS has changed from offering the best healthcare to offering value for money.
The best example of this is the failed NHS IT Project at a cost of GBP£ 12 Billion over 10 years. This was a great example of visionary thinking in digitising the UK’s medical records saving time and money, however the implementation of this ambitious program led to its downfall.
The UK government eventually mothballed the project and the Public Accounts Committee began to look into the reason for the spectacular failure. Two main causes were identified:
1. Those running the project completely dis-regarded the culture and behaviour of how the NHS procures services
2. The failure to flex saw project controls completely swamped by change requests and morphing tech specs
The key takeaways is that Innovation is not about centralised control
Money and access to capital have become intrinsically linked with innovation and success. Yet as the NHS IT project demonstrated, money is not a guarantee of success. For Innovation to succeed it needs to meet the needs of the audience or society. It needs to adapt to changing circumstances.
A case in point is MPESA, a mobile banking service in Kenya. It’s a service that allows the user to buy and sell as well as transfer money without having a bank account.
It was built using SMS technology making it accessible to the majority of the population who otherwise did not have access to a bank or cash machine in a country with poor banking infrastructure. What they realised was that people had access to mobile phones and were highly engaged on SMS
Like the Gutenberg press, MPESA took established technology and adapted it for an audience and environment. There are approximately 5 million MPESA users transferring $500–700m annually (20% GDP).
MPESE is an example of how innovation comes about.
It happens when we copy and adapt
The original intention of MPESA was for the distribution of micro-finance loans. What they found was that people were using it instead to send money home to buy stuff
Industrialist Henry Ford acknowledged this culture of adapting and remixing when he was quoted as saying:
“I invented nothing new, I simply assembled the discovery of other men.
Technology is not innovation
Technology on it’s own does not equal innovation. Lets stop preaching technology as the solution to the world’s problems. We run the risk of creating a world of technological haves and have nots.
If we are currently basking in the warmth of the information age, why has it coincided with broader economic decline?
Rather it’s the intersection of people + technology + ideas that drives innovation.
To summarise
…innovation in the developed world is increasingly making us consume more and this is unsustainable.
Innovation has been intrinsically linked with money but we need to look at other measures such as impact on environment, or improvement on society to really gauge success.
The interesting stuff comes about through copying and adapting. When different ideas and people colliding. But let’s not lose sight that innovation can’t be imposed if it’s not wanted. Ignore your audience at your peril.
Innovation is more than the sum of its parts. It’s what happens when different ideas and people collide. So lets look beyond the filter bubbles of Silicon Valley, beyond the offices of VC’s and advertising to the developing world for inspiration.
