The Humble Hero
Using ZMET to help young people innovate for sustainability
by Djordjija Petkoski, Lecturer and Senior Fellow at The Wharton School
The world has changed radically in the last few years: serious security and development issues, climate change, and problems in the areas of energy, food, water scarcity and resource depletion are increasingly at the forefront of policy and business agendas. The traditional view of business’s role in responding to these threats is shifting. Taking a “hands off” approach is no longer viable. Producers, consumers, retailers, investors, and governments are expecting more transparency, leadership, and forward-thinking on development, environmental, and social issues.
The business community faces high, often unrealistic, expectations to generate innovative solutions to deal with these challenges. At least two critical issues generally have been overlooked.
First, the complexity of solving these challenges has been underestimated. The traditional view of innovation, which focuses on narrowly defined solutions, does not match the complexity of the problems at hand. What is needed is a far more holistic approach to innovation that also deals with fundamentally new business models; a reshaping of the business and policy agenda at global, local, and organizational levels; and innovative partnerships.
Second, although there are nearly three billion young people who constitute half the world’s population, the youth role has been unjustifiably neglected. Young people have developed many of the groundbreaking innovations, particularly in IT, but still they lack sufficient opportunities to innovate in the sustainability space.
For more than four years the World Bank and the Zicklin Center at Wharton have sponsored the Ideas for Action (I4A) Initiative (see http://www.ideas4action.org/ and http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ideas-4-action/) which conducts an annual competition for young people from around the world to submit innovative ideas for financing and implementing groundbreaking innovations in sustainability. The projects are inspired by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations.
One of the key lessons learned is how little we know about the thought process that young people go through when innovating around complex sustainability problems. This missing insight has limited our ability to adequately allocate resources.
To address these challenges I4A partnered with Olson Zaltman, which conducted Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) interviews with members of the top three teams in the 2016 competition.
The research found that although these youth are incredibly motivated to make a difference in the world they face several roadblocks that business and other stakeholders have implicitly and explicitly put in place. These barriers can inhibit their chances of successfully generating innovative intrapreneurial ideas at the corporate level.
The participants in the ZMET research described themselves metaphorically as humble heroes. They are striving to leave an impact on their communities, even if that impact is small compared to the massive global challenges we face. However, they must overcome several emotional obstacles along the road to successful innovation:
Isolation. These young people feel misunderstood in many ways, especially by their families and friends in their home countries. They are sometimes admired, but often seen as hopeless dreamers. As one told us, “You still have people asking what you are doing. People are skeptical. Why don’t you get a job like everyone else? So it is hard to stay motivated.”
Fear. We heard a fear of failure, and a fear of what unseen “dragons” lie in wait. That fear is mixed with some excitement, but there are unknown challenges associated with governmental actions, financing, technology, and marketing that all are lurking along the road ahead.
Inadequacy. When the inevitable bumps in the road and challenges occur, people tend to wonder if they are up to the challenge. As one respondent described, “I beat myself up a lot. Sometimes you feel like you made a mistake, that people are not ready for this. But when I step back and re-evaluate it gives me a deeper sense of what I am trying to achieve and I feel fueled to go on.”
Cynicism. Among a few respondents, there are questions about whether all this good work will come to anything, especially among young people who have experienced broken promises firsthand. As one member of the Nigerian team told us, “I would like to be excited [about the United Nations’ sustainable development goals] but I am skeptical. I would like it to not be all talk. A lot of time talk doesn’t translate into impact.”
Insights such as these can begin to help corporate leaders understand how to engage their employees — especially younger employees — in an innovation process that addresses complex corporate challenges, particularly in the space of sustainability. These are challenges that require truly innovative solutions, not just fine tuning current products and services or offering slight tweaks to business models. These challenges can include (but are not limited to):
- Developing new products and services
- Access to innovative forms of finance, including blended finance
- Entering new markets and market segments
- Shaping the external business and policy ecosystem
- Innovative alliances with nontraditional partners
Managers may not be fully aware of the emotional challenges and obstacles employees are facing — and may not be aware of the “unwritten rules” of their organizational culture that discourage these kinds of innovations and lead to the misallocation of corporate resources.
This March, as part of the Business and Development Innovations Lecture Series, James Forr, Olson Zaltman’s Head of Insights, engaged with Wharton students to discuss the ZMET research and explore how the findings compare with their own experiences working on “development projects” for the I4A competition. The conversation reinforced the power of these insights and had an immediate impact in shaping students’ thought processes. In the words of some students:
“James Forr’s presentation put into perspective the large effect that my emotional connection to my I4A [project] truly has. I was immediately motivated to do a project that was set in my hometown, partially to feel I was doing something influential…In addition, there was a sense of desire to be the hero of the community, with or without a true public face.”
“We will always have limited budgets, scarce resources, ups and downs, but I need to harness my optimism that gives me this great sense of urgency and purpose and momentum to soar into this upward trajectory. It was a relief to speak about the limitation in capability we all feel (the “humble hero”) when approaching a monstrous problem the I4A [project] is attempting to tackle.”
“I was completely inspired when he (James Forr) said ‘If we can make this project and this ‘good’ happen, the success could inspire others to get involved in their own ways seeing that positive change is actually possible.’ — I can be a catalyst triggering a momentum-wave of change, and although it’s incredibly intimidating it is utterly exhilarating and made my emotional association with my I4A [project] more positive.”
It is time to for organizations and nations to get creative and change the way they are leveraging and supporting young intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs. Access to relevant cutting-edge knowledge and experience is not enough, in and of themselves, to improve and scale innovative ideas toward optimal sustainable impact.
If we provide these young people with the proper support, then the best and most relevant ideas — based on the power of data and the better utilization of science, technology, and innovation — will have the chance to see the light of day and begin to solve the immense challenges our world is facing.
Dr. Djordjija Petkoski is Lecturer and Senior Fellow at The Wharton School; Founder and Managing Director of Global CDL, a consulting focused on business and development issues; and former Lead Specialist at The World Bank.
