frugal innovation questions around BRAC and Skoll

[chris macrae]

14 april macrae ‏@obamauni

                                      

#yunuscongress welcome to the week that Bangladesh's Yunus testifies to US Congress and picks up a gold medal - even if a university would be a more fitting prize

http://futurecapitalism.tv  & http://yunusdiary.com  note April's Yes You Can celebrations - last week's 10th skoll world championships where these questions were posed by BRAC ...

three key questions: Do we need more social innovation, or is the big challenge these days just to scale up what we know? Is scale always a good thing? And, is frugal always the best way? 

 

3 Messages from BRAC's Frugal Innovation Forum for the Skoll World Forum

Editor’s Note:  Asif Saleh is the Senior Director of BRAC Strategy, Communications, and Capacity.

This article was published for the 2013 Skoll World Forum. Watch the live stream April 10-12 by clicking here.

On March 30-31, a group of South Asian leaders gathered in Dhaka for the first Frugal Innovation Forum: Scaling Simple Solutions.  Nowhere is the importance of innovation more apparent than in quickly-changing contexts like that of Bangladesh: many villagers are migrating to cities and abroad, women are increasingly entering the workforce, there is a youth bulge, while with increases in life expectancy, the fastest growing demographic is senior citizens.  The complexity and interrelatedness of these problems required more than just new strategies: it requires new paradigms of understanding the situation, thinking holistically about ecosystems and interacting parts, and above all, how to create models with enough flexibility to evolve. The event was powerful and lays out some important issues to frame the upcoming Skoll World Forum at Oxford.

South Asians, perhaps due to the unique environmental factors of the region, seem to have an innate predisposition to what we might call the jugaad, or frugal innovation, mentality.  This was one of the core beliefs that led us to organize the forum in the first place: that there was a unique type of innovation that was springing up across South Asia that would lend itself to further scale and adaption around the region.  Jaideep Prabhu, co-author of Jugaad Innovation, spoke about the importance of this in his opening remarks at the Frugal Innovation Forum.  Perhaps another unique trait of South Asian innovation is that scale is such an assumed part of design.  Where the rest of the world talks in the thousands or tens of thousands, South Asians speak of “lakhs” (hundreds of thousands) or “crores” (tens of millions).  BRAC’s mantra, “small is beautiful, but big is a necessity” is nothing new to practitioners in Pakistan (population 176 million) and India (population 1.2 billion!).   This group converses casually about magnitude of coverage and reach that many countries’ presidents would, justifiably, have trouble fathoming.

Most of us agree with this assertion in the abstract—as citizens of the same region (which not too long ago was actually united under one flag), we know that have similar problems to solve and similar resourcing problems and similar challenges to solve. However, as unfortunate as it is, we are so busy doing what we do well — that we don’t get enough chances to share notes, connect and forge broader partnerships.  And as development problems grow increasingly complex, it becomes a necessity rather than a luxury.  It’s the world’s fate hanging on our shoulders now as well.  The latest UN Development Report asserts,

“The rise of the South is unprecedented in its speed and scale. It must be understood in broad human development terms as the story of a dramatic expansion of individual capabilities and sustained human development progress in the countries that are home to the vast majority of the world’s people…There are new opportunities for catch-up for less developed countries and for creative policy initiatives that could benefit the most advanced economies as well.”

No longer can we look at the South on one hand and the North on the other—our mutual destiny is sealed.

It’s easy to pay lip service to the need to learn from one other, but actually how one does that is not entirely understood.  Rarely can a ready-made model be dropped into a new place.  Even the process of creation is hugely important in developing a sophisticated understanding of not just what works, but why it works.  “Everyone needs to reinvent the wheel,” wrote Madhav Chavan, founder of Pratham, an incredible Indian organization transforming education nationally, “it’s important because all of us need our own kind of wheel.”

We kicked off the event with three key questions: Do we need more social innovation, or is the big challenge these days just to scale up what we know? Is scale always a good thing? And, is frugal always the best way?  We started by looking at these themes across these broad sectors: developing human capital, mobilizing communities, and fostering civic engagement.  The growing divides within countries—urban to rural, connected to offline, young and old, arose as issues that many are wrestling with.  There’s a huge need to platforms to connect people—either in old fashioned, U-shaped meetings or on flashy websites like www.ipaidabribe.org, but of crucial importance is finding the hook: for vocational schools, it’s successfully reading the market demand to essentially guarantee job placement to its studies; for groups of street vendors, it’s knowing to let go and let them lead, even if it means excluding “others,” like waste pickers, and supporting them to create a society that represents their distinct needs.  For many, technology is still a nice idea, but despite the fast growing numbers of cell phones, for many these are still out of reach, particularly rural women.  Finding ways to build the urgently needed infrastructure and create pressure on the government is key, to some extent regardless of the ultimate goal.  Shandana Khan of Pakistan’s Rural Support Programmes Network spoke about first getting communities to mobilize to persuade the government to support community groups.  Once they had created the political commitment for resources, then they were able to scale massively, from just 5 million members to over 30 million.  We see that the reshaping of the rules of the game has huge benefits, and creates a strong foundation for growth.

The Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, housed at Oxford University, promises to be an exciting event bringing together world leaders in innovation for important conversations.  Arbind Singh of Nidan, who spoke at the Frugal Innovation Forum and was recognized as a Skoll Entrepreneur in 2012, will bring some of our discussions to the event.  A few that we would offer to the Skoll community for reflection are: 

Innovations in processes are often underappreciated but of crucial importance.  The biggest and most successful organizations rarely owe their success to a product, but rather their activities and capabilities.

“Big impact” mentality is a must.  In his closing remarks, BRAC’s founder and chairperson Sir Fazle Abed told the participants, “many organizations are happy with results on a small scale.  We need to be more ambitious.”  There are plenty of challenges on the path to scale—don’t let your mindset be one of them!

To go fast (and burn out quickly), go alone.  To go far, go with others and forge a better path. The days of operating in a green field with no regulation or government engagement are gone.  Increasingly, the challenge in development is building capacity for effective, independent action—of communities, of organizations, and of policy-markets.  Nurturing ecosystems that are inclusive, embrace innovation, and value development is the only way to sustainably tackle poverty.