User Led Innovation

Here are some examples of Professor Eric von Hippel's "User Led Innovation" as collected by Nokia's Jan Chipchase:

"Rural Battery Charging Services, Uganda" A short January 2007 presentation authored with Indri Tulusan that introduces the home battery charging services to charge devices with limited access to mains power supply. Given that mobile phones require power, and access to power can be unpredictable how do people keep their mobile phones and other devices charged?
Download PowerPoint, PDF [2MB]

"Power Up: Street Charging Services, Kampala" A short January 2007 presentation authored with Indri Tulusan that introduces the street services that enable Kampala residents without regular access to mains power to keep their mobile phone's charged.
Download PowerPoint, PDF[3MB]

"Village Phone, Uganda" A short January 2007 presentation that introduces a collaboration between Nokia, Grameen Foundation USA, and Micro Finance Initiatives in Uganda to extend cellular connectivity to remote rural locations.
Download PowerPoint, PDF [2MB]

"Community Address Book & Call Log" A short January 2007 presentation co-authored with Indri Tulusan and Lokesh Bitra drawing on research between 2004 and 2006 in India, Nepal and Uganda that documents phone kiosk owner’s use of paper notebooks to record the phone numbers used by their customers - the combination of the book and the kiosk operator effectively becomes the community address book and call log for the members of the community that use that kiosk.
Download PowerPoint, PDF [1MB]

"Shared Phone Practices: Exploratory Field Research from Uganda and Beyond" December 2006 presentation authored with Indri Tulusan that introduces the results of a Nokia study of Shared Phone Use, drawing on research in Uganda, Indonesia, Nepal, India, China and Mongolia. Introduces the concepts of Sente, Step Messaging, Pooling et al..
Download PowerPoint, PDF [6.5MB]

Social entrepreneurs should find the above examples pregnant with meaning.

In keeping with my observation that the world is full of innovation, but not of people who recognise it when they see it, Chipchase states:

The tough part of the job is in using the data to inform, inspire and affect how my colleagues think and what they do.

Technorati Tags: marketing, innovation, social entrepreneurship, Nokia, Eric von Hippel

Enabling Social Innovation

This year's Oxford Skoll Forum will focus on enabling social innovation. It's an interesting problem: we aren't very good at recognising and supporting innovation (at least not in its early stages).

I've been scanning recent best sellers on business innovation, and have found them to be, for the most part, filled with innovation clichés. I'll not list the clichés here, but in the main the advice seems to be: create an environment that encourages "out of the box thinking". (I've come to hate that phrase. Almost everyone I've been introduced to this past week has been described as an "out of the box thinker.")

I'm not convinced that there is a dearth of innovation, but my hunch is that there is a dearth of investors, managers, bureaucrats, politicians and academics who are good at spotting it. Joel Podolny, a very innovative thinker (now dean of the Yale B'School) told me that when Jeff Skoll first showed him the eBay idea (at Stanford), he told Jeff the concept probably wouldn't work.

The Beatles (an innovative musical group some years back:-) were turned down by a number of labels, before EMI/Capitol signed them. In fact, EMI/Capitol had rejected them, but Sir George Martin happened (accidentally) to hear their audition tape, and rushed out to catch Brian Epstein before he left the EMI office.

I am reminded of Gray's lines:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

The creative component that most are now focused on is certainly important, but if we want to stimulate innovation, I think we need to pay some attention to developing an ear or eye for it - a George Martin ear. Our world is rich in innovation, but short on recognition of it. Mark Twain advises us not to worry about having our ideas stolen. He claims that when an innovative idea has merit, most right thinking people will reject it.

The main impediment, I believe, is that our observations are theory laden. We are incapable of unmediated observation. Theory is our vision. We see what we believe. Quid quid recipitur, ad modum recipientis reciptur.

There are, I think, ways around the problem. Sir Karl Popper, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound point to possible solutions, but I'll save that discussion for another day.

If procrastination doesn't catch me, I plan to blog on this topic over the next month, and I hope that many of you will find the time to share your thoughts on the topic.

Technorati Tags: skoll, ntc, social entrepreneurship, nourish the children