Articles by Jocelyn Wyatt

Editor’s note: 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. In his example, the fuel efficient motorcycles that Environfit designed are appealing to its customers because they are faster and cheaper to run, not because they have lower emissions.

A major point of Paul Polak’s during the panel and in his book, Out of Poverty, was that design for the other 90% needs to be about the "ruthless pursuit of affordability." If we can design for people who make less than $1/day, the tools will scale. It’s not enough to cosmetically change existing technologies, rather, they must be designed for the needs of the customers. Tim Brown talked about the need for rapid "just enough" prototyping and close collaboration with customers to ensure that designs are appropriate and useful.

A point which echoed what I had heard throughout the conference was the need to take a business approach to designing for the poor. By showing that profits are possible, big business will be encouraged to enter the market and will start designing for the other 90%. Paul Hudnut emphasized this and mentioned that he’s most proud of the large factory in China that is manufacturing Environfit’s clean burning stoves, which is making it possible for them to be priced affordably enough to sell 10,000/month. Tim Brown added that "all progress has happened because of profit drivers." Philanthropy doesn’t have the potential to make systemic change or scale happen, but business does.

Finally, the panelists all emphasized the need to build local capacity. Kristen Peterson mentioned that designing a local delivery channel for installation and repair of IT solutions will allow for scale. Paul Polak and Tim Brown both emphasized the need to teach innovation and design thinking at universities worldwide. Paul’s plan is to create 100 Stanford and MIT-like design courses at universities, 50 of them in the developing world and Tim hopes to see the creation of design schools in India and Africa.

"Scale" was a frequently-used buzzword at the conference and the question of how to get good ideas to scale is one that remains on the table. We are now seeing how design can address issues of scale. Whether it’s by designing appropriate products or services for the other 90%, by designing the systems around these products or services, or by teaching the design thinking approach to social entrepreneurs and students, design certainly has a contribution to make to this sector and truly has the potential to help good ideas scale and create deep and lasting impact.

Guest blogger Jocelyn Wyatt works for the design firm IDEO, leading its base of the pyramid projects. Prior to joining IDEO, Jocelyn was an Acumen Fund Fellow in Kenya. She holds a MBA from Thunderbird. Jocelyn blogs at Design and Reach.

By Jocelyn Wyatt

As NextBillion.net mentioned last week, The Rockefeller Foundation and IDEO recently presented their research on how design firms can get more involved in social sector work. We presented this work in the form of a how-to guide and a workbook on how to use design to intentionally create positive social impacts and have posted the deliverables online.

Before I joined IDEO, I wondered (like most of you probably do) what application design could have to addressing some of the world’s largest problems. Tim Brown does a great job laying out the basics on design thinking in a recent article in Harvard Business Review entitled Design Thinking.

During the course of our work with Rockefeller, we had 142 conversations with social entrepreneurs, foundations, management consultants, academics, writers, and designers. What we heard over and over again was frustration with the progress in addressing the problems that we all care about and excitement about the potential of design thinking as a new approach.

Three aspects of design thinking that are particularly salient for social enterprises are empathy, prototyping, and storytelling.

I remember my time at the Skoll World Forum last year as one of my favorite weeks during the fellowship. The opportunity to spend time with the fellows and share our stories, reconnect with Acumen Fund, and participate in inspiring conversations around social entrepreneurship was truly a magical experience. I was very excited to return this year and was even able to convince IDEO’s CEO, Tim Brown and Co-Creative Officer, June Fulton Suri, to join me.

The Forum did not let anyone down and the excitement I felt upon arrival has stayed with me since. The energy and optimism around social entrepreneurs and those supporting them is incredible. Participating in discussions about scale, microfranchising, and climate change were especially stimulating and the lens of culture, which was a focus of the forum this year, was a great addition to the many more economic-based conversations we tend to have in this field.

I was fortunate to lead a workshop with my colleagues from IDEO, Tim, Jane, and Aaron, about using empathy as a tool for social impact. The purpose of the workshop was to give a quick taste of the IDEO design process and teach a few observation techniques for social entrepreneurs trying to understand different cultural contexts. While IDEO workshops are always fun, the quality of the observations and ideas that come out of them is quite varied. Working with a group of 60 esteemed practitioners, we were very impressed by the depth of observations they noted and the innovativeness of ideas that they generated.

If in only two hours teams could come up with ideas like midwives on bikes, wandering microscopes, and health pods, just think of what they could do in a few weeks.

Acumen Fund investee Advanced Bio-Extracts Limited (ABE) is working hard to fight malaria by producing low-cost artemisinin in East Africa. Artemisinin is a key ingredient in the new malaria treatments (artemisinin-based combination therapies or ACTs) recommended by the World Health Organization to fight the increase in cases of drug-resistant malaria.

As this recent article in The New York Times explains, until recently, the high cost of ACTs significantly limited the drugs’ availability to the people most in need. The high cost was a result of many things, including limited availability of the raw material used to produce artemisinin. In the past few years, ABE has played a key role in scaling-up raw material production and pushing the cost of artemisinin down. Whereas ACTs used to be sold in Africa for $3 - $4 per adult treatment, they now cost approximately $1 per adult treatment.

In January 2007, ABE commissioned the first factory in Africa to produce artemisinin and has delivered enough artemisinin to treat 3 million cases of malaria in only two months. ABE expects to manufacture 50 million ACTs (malaria treatments) by the end of the year. In addition to supplying artemisinin to the leading producer of ACTs for the World Health Organization, ABE is affiliated with the pharmaceutical company that will manufacture ASAQ, the anti-malaria medicine mentioned in the NYT article. ABE is excited about the introduction of ASAQ and believes that the fewer pills required will significantly improve the effectiveness of the medication. Many people discontinue treatment mid-dosage with other ACTs because of the high number of pills required. It is exciting to support a company that is making such an enormous impact on the fight against malaria.