NextBillion.net - Development Through Enterprise - What’s GOOD: Incubating, Disseminating and Commercializing Appropriate Technology at the BoP - Comments

Appropriate Technology, business development, and franchising

Cat Laine — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 11:00:44 -0500

I second Amy's emotion about simple not meaning easy for appropriate technologies. It takes a tremendous about of work to take a product, strip away all the bells and whistles, and still get something that is affordable and works the way you want it to. It takes years of design, prototyping, testing and redesign.

Re: the question of dissemination and distribution
That is an issue that torments us at AIDG. It is with great frustration that we look at the range of amazing technology designed to serve the BOP and the molasses slowness with which it gets to the people who need it the most. Business development is most certainly the best way to diffuse and spread these products. The dilemma is getting the right business model, initial funding and the talent pool to successfully mass-produce, market and distribute the tech. That's the nut we're trying to crack.

We're really interested in the idea of franchising at the moment. Can you take a successful business with great products like drip irrigation kits or treadle pumps and replicate their work in another country, while also paying the parent company a franchise fee?

Re D-Lab
One tech developed in the D-Lab is moving towards becoming a full scale enterprise, specifically sugarcane charcoal. See http://bagazocharcoal.com/ for more info.

IDEO

Tayo Akinyemi — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 23:45:30 -0500

Thanks, Jocelyn! I was completely remiss in not mentioning IDEO in my post. That's what happens when you haven't blogged in awhile. In any case, I'd love to learn more about the new initiative.

Design for Social Impact at IDEO

Jocelyn Wyatt — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:28:41 -0500

Great posting. I completely agree that design is a fantastic tool for addressing some of the world's largest problems. I wanted to mention that IDEO (www.ideo.com) has recently started an initiative around design for social impact. We recognize the need for products and services that are designed to meet the wants and needs of the BoP and believe that our processes in human centered and humanity centered design can be applied.

What’s GOOD: Incubating, Disseminating and Commercializing Appropriate Technology at the BoP

Tayo Akinyemi — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:52:55 -0500

I am sure that few of you are strangers to Amy Smith’s work at MIT’s D-Lab. After all, the D-Lab has been profiled several times here at NextBillion, most recently in an article featured in the news room via GOOD magazine. The article aptly describes D-Lab’s current crop of appropriate technologies, developed with the needs and constraints of the end user in mind.

"Designs are more likely to be successful if they’re not complicated and requiring all sorts of support and infrastructure," says Smith. "But simple doesn’t mean easy. It’s a challenge to get to those ‘simple’ solutions."

(Read the full article)

The five innovations profiled: a water chlorination controller (to reliably regulate the addition of chlorine to a stored water supply), a screen-less hammermill (to churn grain into flour), low-cost water test (to test drinking water safety), phase change incubator (low-cost incubator), are definitely simple, rugged, cheap, and replicable. But are they scalable? The answer is "they could be."

"We’re not as well-equipped to do dissemination as we would like," says Smith, who notes that D-Lab only has about 30 students at any one time. "We’re interested in finding the right partners to move the technologies forward." Scale and dissemination determine where "the rubber meets the road" in a university-based system of innovation.

One has to wonder what the best mechanism for sharing these innovations is. Should development projects be built around them? Can they support small businesses like the ones conceived by the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group? Or might they spawn full scale enterprises, like d.light design, which grew out of the class project at Stanford? Regardless, I truly appreciate the notion of starting a "design revolution" that will encourage engineers to create strictly for challenging environments, and expand the field of appropriate technology design.

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue)