Jocelyn Wyatt leads the Design for Social Impact initiative at IDEO (a global design consultancy). Prior to IDEO, Jocelyn worked as an Acumen Fund fellow in Kenya and served as Interim Country Director for VisionSpring in India. Jocelyn has an MBA from Thunderbird and a BA in Anthropology from Grinnell College. She blogs (periodically) on www.jocelynwyatt.com.

By Jocelyn Wyatt

Fully admitting my bias here, I did think the Design in the Developing World panel was an especially interesting conversation between a top-notch set of designers and practitioners. Caroline Balerin launched the panel with the question "What would it look like to design for the other 90%?" I fully expected the panelists, who have traditionally designed products, to respond with something about appropriately designed technologies. I was pleasantly surprised to hear each of them respond with the need to design not only the products, but the systems around them.

Paul Polak noted that the design of tools is trivial compared to designing how to mass market them. Tim Brown followed up with the need for us to design the distribution channels, supply chains and marketing strategies to ensure they get to market and scale. "Breakthrough innovation in the developing world is happening by designing systems." Kristen Peterson built on this with a story about how Inveneo started by designing hardware, but realizing that wasn’t enough, has moved to building partnerships with local entrepreneurs who can distribute the IT services.  

The second point, which was made by Paul Hudnut, was the importance of empathy and the need to speak to your customers in a way that makes sense to them.

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... said Christine Eibs Singer from E+Co, referring to the way that industry has been able to achieve the "investment class status", raise millions in capital and at the same time operate under common standards under the leadership of organizations like CGAP.

The need for such a coordinated approach among those supporting "Small and Growing Businesses" is the starting point of the Aspen Network for Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE). A panel discussing the network marked a high point Tuesday afternoon during the Social Capital Markets Conference.

Andrew Stern, a partner at Dalberg, moderated a conversation among organizations representing some of the leading practices that are part of the network.

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I absolutely love that phrase.  I heard it at the Social Capital Markets 2008 conference this week in beautiful San Francisco, said by William Foote, Founder and President of Root Capital, on a panel I didn't attend but heard about later.  The phrase perfectly epitomizes the mood and underlying themes of the conference, and the panel I myself moderated, as well as the panel I was asked to blog about for NextBillion.net.

I love this phrase because I see the positive message within it, just as I tend to see the positive in most things, including my approach to business strategy which I call "disruptive leadership." which I've already blogged about here.

You could argue there is absolutely nothing positive in the word "pathological."   The Encarta® definition leaves little room for a positive interpretation:

 

path·o·log·i·cal adj

1. uncontrolled or unreasonable

2. relating to disease or arising from disease

3. relating to pathology or used in pathology

I follow the Dale Carnegie theory that he puts forth in his famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, in which he posits that humans are driven primarily by self-interest.  He writes that the only way to influence people is to speak to them in terms that either makes them feel good or portrays how you can help them.

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