5 Things the World’s Poor Can Teach Us About Innovation
When we think of innovation most people think of the technology sector and in particular Silicon Valley. We think of Facebook, Google, Snapchat and Uber. However, nobody has a monopoly on innovation. By its very nature, innovation relies on the inclusion of new voices that have yet to be heard. We need to embrace these new voices and their ideas. We should start with the most marginalized members of society. We should start with the world’s poor as they have a lot to teach us about innovation, here are 5 things to start:
1) Embrace Constraints
Many organizations focus on what they don’t have and use these constraints as excuses for underachievement. We’ve all heard common complaints like “if only we had more money to buy a faster machine” or “I need more Facebook followers, but don’t have the time to engage”. To use terminology from Adam Morgan’s & Mark Barden’s book A Beautiful Constraint, these people are trapped as “victims” of constraint. They don’t have the capacity to neutralize or transform the constraints they face.
The world’s poor could certainly complain about being victims of constraint, but they just get on with it. They have no choice. Take William Kamkwamba, a teenager in Malawi and subject of the book “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”. William wanted to provide his family with two “luxuries” that only 2% of the population had at the time — electricity and running water. William didn’t have the money to buy expensive equipment. He manufactured his wind turbine from spare bike parts and scrap materials. He embraced his constraints to develop an unorthodox and innovative solution.
2) Focus on Necessity
The quickest way to kill any company is to spend valuable resources developing “innovative” products and features that the customer simply doesn’t want. In his book “The Lean Startup”, Eric Ries suggests that the best way to ensure relevant innovation is to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that speeds up market entry and accelerates the customer feedback loop. Unfortunately, most companies struggle to determine minimum viability.
The world’s poor have an innate capacity to determine minimum viability. They understand what’s truly necessary, their survival often depends on it. Next time you’re looking to develop a true MVP, think like the world’s poor. You’ll be certain to strip out unnecessary features and accelerate the feedback you need to ensure that your innovations are relevant.
3) Repurpose Relentlessly
History is littered with stories about companies that made huge investments in large-scale equipment, only for the market to shift and render these investments worthless. These sunk costs destroy companies, inhibit future risk-taking and stifle innovation. There are very few examples where that investment has been repurposed to restore value.
The world’s poor often have no option but to repurpose. Whether it’s due to a lack of money, import embargos, or something else, they find a way to restore value from previous purchases. You only need to look at Cuba. For years, Cubans have suffered from a U.S. embargo that has cut off access to many of the essentials that we take for granted in the developed world. They have responded admirably by creating fan blades from old vinyl records and toy cars from old adhesive bottles. Their lives have essentially become a perpetual hackathon and those skills are crucial to innovation.
4) Share Capacity
In developed markets, we have become so obsessed with chasing scale that we frequently end up with destructive excessive capacity. Recently, attempts have been made to reduce the burden of such excess capacity through the so-called sharing economy. Companies such as AirBnb and Uber are leading the way by using technology to encourage capacity sharing and a more efficient allocation of resources.
Many treat the sharing economy as a new phenomenon. However, the poor have been driving innovation in the sharing economy for centuries. With less capital to spend, they have built strong networks to share effectively and mutualize rather than utilize capacity. It’s the only way they can afford that new water well for the village or a centralized washing machine station. In many ways, their sharing economy is more efficient as they solve for capacity utilization upfront rather than creating excess capacity in the first place and then trying to back-solve.
5) Spend Wisely
You may be thinking what does spending wisely have to do with innovation? Isn’t innovation all about spending big, taking risks and swinging for the fences? If you were to believe the hubris that comes out of Silicon Valley, you may think that were the case. However, innovation is inherently messy. Innovation is about iterating. It’s about second chances. Often it’s those that preserve enough cash to pay for that second chance, that unexpected pivot, that succeed in the end. The world’s poor are frugal. They only spend on what’s necessary. They can teach us a lot about spending wisely and saving for that all-important second roll of the dice.
It’s Time to Listen
If we want to think differently, we must embrace people with different thoughts. We should start with the most marginalized members of society, those we have listened to the least. The worlds’ poor can teach us a lot about innovation, if we’re willing to learn from them.
Originally published at www.thelatlabs.com on February 23, 2017.
