What can street traders and activists teach us about product development?
For years in Manila there was a street side trade in fuel, sold in recycled bottles. Sellers would bulk buy* fuel in the morning and then use it to fill soft drink and wine bottles, bought from junk shops for a couple of cents, before selling them on to passing motorists.
The fuel was often more expensive than at petrol stations, about 6 cents more per litre, but consumers were happy to pay to avoid wasting fuel on driving up to 20mins to purchase very small amounts of fuel each day.
The trade offered a valuable service until a couple of years ago when the Philippine Department of Energy clamped down claiming that it robbed formal petrol stations of income and was a risk to health.
Health and safety (and protectionism) aside, you have to wonder why such a valuable service was not legitimised by the authorities, or adopted and operationalised by industry.
It’s a romantic tale, and like many tales of innovative disruption, the romance comes from the roguish entrepreneurship that challenged an established order to deliver something that people found genuinely valuable.
Such tales are appealing because we like stories of upstarts, outlaws and ordinary folk who, like Robin Hood, upset the applecart and find ways to disrupt the perceived stranglehold of much more powerful, better resourced and well funded organisations.
The self-taught innovator
We gain inspiration from tales of amateur tinkerers who, despite the odds, tenaciously manage to create something innovative with the potential to vastly improve the lives of others, such as William Kamkwamba ‘the boy who harnessed the wind.’
Kamkwamba grew-up in poverty in Malawi and was forced to leave school after a crippling famine. He couldn’t return because his family lacked the money for school fees. Still hungry to learn, he would visit the school library where he found a love for electronics.
This led to a small, and poorly paid, enterprise fixing radios, which in turn led to experiments creating makeshift wind turbines to power his family’s home.
At first, the people around him thought he was crazy. However, after a number of iterations Kamkwamba had a turbine that was providing free energy and a solar powered pump supplying the first drinking water to his village.
His tenacity and ingenuity soon gained him international attention and his story has been featured on The Daily Show, covered by Time magazine and documented in William and the Windmill, which won the South by Southwest Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Feature in 2013. He has also taken the stage at TED.
Heroic activists
We admire those who refuse to accept the line being pedalled by those who would rather we piped down and accept what we’re given, like the citizen scientists who found ways to monitor the impact of the Gulf of Mexico BP oil disaster despite an effective media blackout.
Public Labs’ would-be co-founders, Shannon Dosemagen, Jeff Warren and Stewart Long began their journey with an audacious plan to use helium balloons and cheap digital cameras to record and map the devastation created by the spill, and address the incomplete and contradicting information being made available.
By using open source software, and rallying and training a grassroots volunteer group, they gathered 100,000 images of the affected area, stitched together to create a high resolution map of the spill’s impact. These images were uploaded to Google earth, in partnership with Google Earth Outreach, which helped feed the world’s media and give local residents a platform to speak firsthand about what was happening in the Gulf.
Dosemagen, Warren and Long formally launched Public Lab as a nonprofit organization in summer 2011, its aim being to create, “a new research and social space for the development of low-cost tools for community based environmental monitoring and research.”
Agile, inventive and collaborative the story of Public Labs is testament to what people are able to achieve with readily available software, cheap consumer electronics and a deep desire to change things.
Survivalists — innovate or die
And we love to hear and recount stories about people’s heroic attempts to ’think outside the box’, to overcome massive challenges in the most pressurised situations. For example, the story of how the crew of Apollo 13 had to find a way to make a square peg fit a round hole and literally avert death.
What these stories and examples have to teach us about innovation is not to underplay the role your story has to play in forming and selling new ideas.
As an innovator, you are not just in the business of generating valuable ideas, you are in the business of delivering romantic, heroic propositions that challenge the established order.
So when you’re forming or explaining your valuable new service or product don’t forget to let people know how it’s saving them from the tyranny of business as usual.
*Or otherwise acquire.
You might also enjoy: 52 things I learned in 2016
Previously: Why 8 year-olds can’t be trusted to design products for grown-ups
Dean Wilson is Senior Consultant at Fluxx, a company that uses experiments to understand customers, helping clients to build better products. We work with organisations such as Atkins, National Grid, the Parliamentary Digital Service and William Hill.
