Category: Reluctant innovation

Why planning isn’t everything: Embracing serendipity, chance and luck in the pursuit of social change

Each year, hundreds – if not thousands – of engaged students walk through the doors of schools, colleges and universities around the world eager to learn the art of social change. But is this the best approach? Does turning social entrepreneurship into an academic discipline give out the right message?

Classes in social innovation, social entrepreneurship and design thinking have become increasingly popular in recent years. On the one hand, this might be seen as a good thing. After all, the world needs as many smart, engaged citizens as it can get, particularly when you consider the multitude of challenges we face as a planet. But does a career in social change really begin in the classroom, or out in the real world? How much social change is planned, and how much accidental? And which approach tends to lead to the most meaningful, lasting or impactful solutions? These questions, which have occupied my mind for some time, are the ones I tackled in my recent book, “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator”.

In our desperation to explain and control the world around us we put things in boxes, label them up and then study them to death. We look for the ‘secret sauce’ in successful ideas while trying to break down the characters and personalities of the people behind them. Finding the next Steve Jobs becomes an obsession. Books on social innovation abound, as if making the world a better place was a ten-step process which, if followed vigorously, will guarantee us meaningful change. I’m sure I’m not alone, but my experience of social innovation isn’t anything like this. Instead, I see serendipity, luck and chance play a bigger part than we dare admit. Of course that said, it’s what people do with their chance encounter that matters, not the chance discovery itself, as Scott Berkun reminds us in his best-selling book, The Myths of Innovation.

In The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator, all ten people featured took their chance. And what makes their stories even more interesting is that, in most cases, they weren’t even looking for anything to solve. The thing that ended up taking over their lives found them.

village-testing-SLS-Brij

Brij interacting with viewers in Gulbai Tekra Slum, Ahmedabad. Photo: Jaydeep Bhatt. (c) PlanetRead

Brij Kothari, for example, who conceived the idea behind a subtitling tool while eating pizza, which is today helping hundreds of millions of Indian children. Joel Selanikio whose frustration at a lack of reliable health information drove him to develop a mobile data collection tool. Laura Stachel, who developed solar-powered suitcases for maternity wards after seeing mothers and babies die in the dark on Nigerian wards. Or Sharon Terry, who took on a genetic disease after a shock diagnosis that her children were sufferers.

In something of a break from conventional wisdom, in the majority (but not all) of these cases the innovators were far from qualified to take on the challenge. In a sense, they did things in reverse by encountering a problem which troubled them, and then picked up the skills they needed to rectify it as they went. This is a very different approach to the one taught in the classroom, which sees engaged young millennials taught the art of pitching, business modelling and design thinking before they’re unleashed on the world in search of a problem.

Value for money?

It’s also a very different approach to the one carried out by the international development community which has, over the past six decades, burnt its way through over $3 trillion in its efforts to rid the world of its social and environmental ills (causing a few of its own along the way, I’d hasten to add). The sector has effectively institutionalised development, professionalising it and making it almost inaccessible to ordinary people, including the kind of talent featured in the book.

Of course, it would be hard to justify spending any amount of money in the hope that you’d get lucky, or get that chance encounter with an innovative solution or idea. So what can we do to increase our chances of it happening?

A few tips from the book:

  1. Be curious and inquisitive. Ask questions. Take nothing for granted.
  2. Take time to understand the world. It’s complicated.
  3. Leave your comfort zone. Spend time with the people you’re trying to help.
  4. Don’t assume you can fix anything. Sit, listen, observe.
  5. Be patient. Remember this is a life-long journey, not a three month project.

Finally, work on something that gets you out of bed in the morning (and that will continue to do so for years to come). Make it something that switches you on, that fuels your passion. This is probably most crucial. Howard Thurman was spot on. “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who come alive”.

Publishing and the art of iteration

Eighteen months ago, “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator” hit the shelves. The product of a combination of donations, crowdfunding, ten inspiring innovators, an editor with too much time on his hands, and an engaged publisher, the book was always something of an experiment. Tales of people innovating ‘outside the system’ – people with little by way of resources or money, and often without qualification or permission – just getting on with fixing social ills that deeply bothered them seemed like stories the world needed to hear.

Today, it looks like I may have underestimated the number of people who wanted to hear them.

Professional book reviews are hard to get, particularly when you self publish. But the couple we got were great (here’s one). Amazon reviews were even better – standing today at 43 and counting, and all five star reviews bar a couple. It even topped Amazon’s “Development Studies” charts for a while. All of this, of course, in addition to the couple-of-dozen fantastic post-publication endorsements we got.

Interestingly, universities and colleges around the world quickly started picking up on the book as it found its way into numerous social innovation and ICT4D classes. For me, this has been the biggest positive for the book. One typical response appeared on Amazon:

Stories for every college campus

Ken Banks has collected a volume of stories here that need to be told on every college campus. College campuses are at this moment unique seedbeds of opportunity. Populated with “Millennial Searchers” who, in increasing numbers, tell us they define life success in terms of meaning, purpose, and making a difference, and shaped by the larger movements of social entrepreneurship and sustainability, college curricula have begun shifting towards educating students to become agents for change.

What our change agents need above all right now is not more information, but stories – stories that the move them from paralysis and despair in the face of social disintegration and ecological loss to actions shaped by courage, humor, and hope. These stories do this. And because they inject so much of the raw, the uncertain, and the unformed portion of reality into their tales they are stories on which students will clamber for in the face of the challenges of their generation.

These stories speak eloquently about power – the power of connections, the power in confronting power structures for the sake of the marginal, the power of serendipity, the power of the human spirit to overcome immense challenges and work towards transformation and justice. In doing so, they function as a calling to that part of ourselves that will recreate and restore human and natural communities, that bears witness to our capacity for both good and ill, and that remembers the full range of ingenuity and wisdom we possess individually and as a species.

Wendy Petersen Boring, co-editor, “Teaching Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences”

Over the past few months it’s become increasingly clear that I ought to make more of the book. So I started speaking to an international publisher, and am delighted to share news that I’ve now been offered a full publishing deal to release a new, revised and re-worked “Rise of the Reluctant Innovator” early next year (though the title will need to change to something a little more search-engine-friendly, apparently).

Over the summer I’ll be working with the existing chapter contributors, and some new ones, putting a little more structure around each of their stories. The essence of the book will remain the same, but we’ll make it more useful to students of social entrepreneurship and social innovation. We’ve already learnt that our approach is a little unique, and that it stands out from other books which are often dominated by theory and stuffy concepts. Ever since I started inviting FrontlineSMS users to write about their work and experiences using the software way back in 2005, I’ve been increasingly convinced that people are primarily motivated and inspired by raw stories of innovation.

Watch this space for news and updates over the coming months. In the meantime, you can check out the current book offering here.

Book Review

The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator
Ken Banks (ed), London Publishing Partnership, 2013, 232 pages

Review by the Society of Business Economists

“Any book with a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and comments from the World Economic Forum, the BBC and National Geographic is surely one to take notice of, and this book still exceeded my expectations in so many ways.

If the book has a purpose, it is probably to inspire us to innovate using existing technology for those who cannot help themselves. As an economist in the field of innovation and creativity I was ready to uncover the principles involved. What I didn’t expect was the emotional roller coaster that made me stop and wonder why I was so close to tears. Human stories of injustice and income inequality are so much more powerful than statistics. Politicians and economists please take note. I was moved by the magnanimous response of the human spirit to solve the problems. Surprising as this may sound, the story here of a patent lawyer was especially moving.

There are ten stories of ‘reluctant’ innovators. None was forced to innovate but they had the classic necessary combination of motivation, knowledge and ability.

The book was hard to follow sometimes, but much easier if you read about the person and their innovation at the back of the book, before you read their chapter. So many stories in one set of covers made it a little messy too, but also gave so many interesting angles on ‘social’ innovation.

It is an emotional book about the human spirit and the desire help people who cannot help themselves. It is a book about the struggle that innovators face to introduce even low-budget, life-saving innovations. It is a book about the failure of the current economic system to address social needs and how poorer people are locked out from the most basic health care. I got an insight into why childbirth is so dangerous in developing countries; it is more basic than I thought.

This is an uplifting and motivating book about the best aspects of human creativity and desire to help those who need it. It is also a book about not clearing your conscience by convincing yourself that Governments and NGO’s are acting on your behalf; their ego and short-sightedness often gets in the way of innovation despite them being good at some things. It is a story of how any of us with the will can creatively apply our knowledge of existing technology in new situations to have outstanding life-saving or life-changing effects for others.

If that is not enough for you, there is a hidden ‘how-to’ manual about social innovation including the qualities you need. This is no technical manual about stage-gating and managing risk, but rather a guide to making something happen against all odds.

It inspired me to make some of our social innovations around economics happen and it’s a long time since that happened to me. I’ll be using some of the examples of creativity, and recommending partners read this book to get them fired-up for innovation.”

Review by Adrian Woods. Reprinted with permission.

For more on “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator”, including endorsements and a free sample, visit the book website at reluctantinnovation.com

Field of dreams

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Two years ago this summer, long-time friend Erik Hersman and I took a stroll through this grass meadow in St. Ives, a small market town in Cambridgeshire where I work from a small office above a supermarket. Erik was on holiday, but that didn’t stop us taking a long walk discussing life, family and work. Erik had a few ideas on the boil, and I was entering a new phase after stepping back from day-to-day operations at FrontlineSMS a couple of months earlier.

I walk a lot, and often use the time to think, strategise and develop my ideas. The walk with Erik that day wasn’t particularly unusual, but something rather rare and unusual has happened since.

During our conversation, I told Erik I was thinking of publishing a book on social innovation – something I’d always wanted to do but lacked the seed of what I thought was a solid enough idea. That summer, a short article I’d penned – Genius Happens When You Plan Something Else – had appeared in the print edition of Wired magazine in the UK. The article looked at the concept of reluctant innovation, but was only 600 words long. I felt there was much more of a story to tell, and discussed the idea of turning the article into a full book. Erik was, of course, invited to contribute a chapter on his own life and work.

Once I’d decided to go for it, the next fifteen months were frantic. There were times the book looked like it wouldn’t come off. The first Kickstarter campaign was a spectacular failure. The second was better thought out and successful. That campaign was topped up by the Curry Stone Foundation, and a little personal funding on top took the book past a key financial hurdle. Along the way I managed to find a publisher, secure a foreword from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and collect two dozen high profile endorsements. Everything finally fell into place and in November 2013 “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator” hit the shelves, hitting top spot in Amazon’s ‘Development Studies’ chart a few months later. A number of colleges and universities in the US and UK have also picked up on the book, using it as part of their social innovation courses.

Self-publishing is tough, and a massive learning curve, but it’s been well worth it. “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator” always felt like a book that needed to exist. Thanks to that walk in the meadow, today it does.

If my book was to be difficult, Erik’s idea was on another planet. Today you’ll know the vague little black box we discussed as BRCK. The conversation was fascinating on a number of levels, and I loved the idea of a Kenyan outfit fixing an African problem that others either didn’t know about, or didn’t care about. But while we were both serial software developers, neither of us had built hardware before (although we had talked about designing and building a FrontlineSMS/Ushahidi GSM modem a couple of years earlier during one of our stints at PopTech). That summer I was about to throw myself into the murky world of publishing. Erik was on the verge of doing the same in the hardware industry. I didn’t envy him.

Two years on, and the BRCK is a reality thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that blew their total out of the water, followed up by a further $1.2 million in venture funding. (Erik was always determined to make this a business, not another non-profit venture. We’ve had many conversations about the need for a more solid business approach to the kinds of ‘development’ problems BRCK was built to solve). It’s not been easy for the team, and I’ve been fortunate to see early prototypes and have numerous behind-the-scenes conversations on the challenges of not only building hardware, but doing it from East Africa.

That said, the BRCK team have been very open about the process and they’ve regularly blogged updates when things have been going well, and not so well. “Problems, Perseverance, and Patience” gives great insight, as does this post by Erik himself which will take you through the whole BRCK story. No mention of the meadow there, though.

We constantly hear that ideas are cheap, and that it’s all about execution. To an extent, that’s true. What was unusual about that summer walk in the meadow – our field of dreams – wasn’t so much two friends sharing ideas, but two friends with a dream they both saw through. In both our worlds, BRCK and “The Rise” both felt like things that needed to exist.

Thankfully, today, they do.