Social Innovation in Resource Scarce Markets

Hivos and Kennisland in March, 2013 organized Lab2 that brought together social innovators from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania.  Together, we grappled with what is perhaps *the* question encapsulated in the lab summary:

Social innovation labs are the latest vehicles for systemic change – for disrupting the way our cities, our schools, our welfare programs, even our economic systems run. But what is in the black box called ‘the lab’? How do they really work?

In a very simplified description of how social change happens, we think projects might be successfully implemented if certain inputs are provided to carry out a project ( typically human resources, awareness, and project specific input like a well, or a technology platform, improved method etc. ), something happens when society interacts with these inputs, and at the end of it all, social change is hopefully observed.

There however still remains much of which is unknown. Like, what it is that occurs to produce this social change? Labs2 was an exploration of this mysterious alchemy. In addition to figuring out this magic middle potion, other questions arose e.g. innovators, especially those from the Global South, often have to juggle multiple roles.  When speaking to innovators in Africa, a common refrain is that they have to do it all. In addition to being the innovators, they also have to be the ones who scale the innovation, as well as at times help in creating the infrastructure needed to support the scaling and uptake of their innovation.

At the recently concluded World Summit on the Information Society Forum 2013, an interesting high panel discussion was held to talk about innovation.  The ICT Innovations and Standards dialogue looked at innovation from the perspective of emerging economies and barriers and enablers of this.

Innovation, a panelist pointed out, was the result of an education system, funding for sustained R&D, funding for adoption of this technology etc.   They also discussed innovation as basically a two step procedure with conceptualization as the first step and commercialization as the second.  The latter, which entails the scaling and replication of the ideas developed during conceptualization is a very resource intensive process, and there  are lessons to be learned from countries like India, that’s exploring the idea of frugal innovation, which is the provision of solutions using the least resources possible.  They also looked at reverse innovation, which is the modification of  products designed in emerging markets for sale in developed countries.

The end result from these two very illuminating sessions was a policy question. Where should limited funding be directed in order to best sustain constrain based innovation? Is it in the conceptualization of ideas? The commercialization? A strategic mix of both? To be explored.

Resources:
Frugal Innovation Primer
Meeting Summary: ICT Innovations and Standards