The Better World by Design Conference was hosted last week by Brown University and the Rhode Island Design Institute (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. I attended the conference as a speaker and was impressed that the event was entirely student organized and run. The conference drew about 200 people from the design industry, private sector, social sector, and academia. We heard from a good mix of practitioners, consultants, and researchers.

The conference mapped closely to IDEO’s Design for Social Impact initiative so it was very much in-line with the work we’ve been doing for the past year. Just as way of background, the purpose of IDEO’s design for social impact work is to cause transformational change in communities of need.

One theme that was repeated throughout the conference was the importance of developing empathy. We heard from Ross Evans (founder of Xtracycle and World Bike) and Cameron Sinclair (founder of Architecture for Humanity) about the need to live and eat in the communities we are designing with. We must work to understand the complexities of the local context and be sure to work closely with local partners. While this seems like an obvious tenant of design, many people at the conference shared market insights but didn’t share stories of people or human insights. We need to make sure that we’re looking not just as what’s for sale at markets and what is being advertised, but that we actually talk to people about what they want and need.

A second theme which was emphasized at this conference as well as at the Design in the Developing World panel at SoCap, was the need to apply design thinking to business models, distribution systems, and marketing. As Emily Pilloton, Founder of Project H said “The design is easy. The implementation is tough.” This was reiterated by Paul Polak who spoke about the need to design products and their distribution cheaply enough so companies can be profitable by selling them and multinationals will be enticed to enter base of the pyramid markets.

Finally, at the conference, there was a general sense of excitement, accompanied by a sense of urgency. There was a feeling that social design, or design for the greater good, was catching on, both within the design industry, as well as within the social sector and low-income markets. There was little discussion about how to run a business by working with clients who are not able to pay (or pay much) for design services. However, the work that IDEO and Rockefeller Foundation engaged in addresses this question to some extent. I am optimistic about the future of design for social impact and saw that the Better World by Design conference was able to convene a number of the leaders of this movement and engage us in 3 days of interesting and inspiring conversations.

A new social network site, BOP Source, launched recently. This is the first social networking site for the base of the pyramid. While at this point, it looks like members are people who are interested in working with the BOP (not necessarily BOP customers themselves), there are nevertheless, some interesting conversations that are starting to take place.

Check it out and complete your profile. Let's see if we can get some discussions going about BOP markets.

This fall, David Lehr and I taught a seven week course at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, which spanned the worlds of philanthropy, business and many of the way points in between. We were both Acumen Fund Fellows (class of 2007) and as part of our post-Fellowship goals each of us wanted to find a way to get teaching experience and also share what had learned over the past several years.

As good luck would have it, our next steps took us to San Francisco a year ago (David via Mercy Corps and me via IDEO) and through one of the student leaders we met at the Global Social Venture Competition, we were asked to teach a one-credit course held for two hours each Thursday.

The class was called Enterprising Solutions: Market-Based Approaches for Reducing Poverty. Each week, we took on a different theme with the overall goal of understanding where we had come from in the development field, what market- based approaches were, why they were so interesting and what were some of the macro issues, like trade policy, that impacted this work. Other themes included social enterprise, microfranchising, design for social impact, corporate responsibility, social investing, and trade.

We began each session by framing the topic and brought in guest speakers to dive in more deeply. Our phenomenal speakers included David Green, Kevin Jones, Dwight Wilson, George Scharffenberger, and many more. The readings were equally enagaging and included leading thinkers that ranged from Amartya Sen to Roger Riddell to Paul Collier.

We were astounded by the number of students interested in taking the class. We expected 20 students to show up and had 60 at the first class. Most rewarding of all, they kept coming back! By the end of the course, 110 students had come to at least one session. Each week the students came prepared and ready to engage. While about half came from the business school, students also came from public policy, public health, engineering, and the undergraduate program. They asked tough questions and had plenty of opinions which they openly shared.

Teaching this course was great! There is something very empowering about sharing ideas and learnings. There is also a heck of a lot of preparation that we had to put in to stay ahead of the students which finally forced us to read those books and articles that might have just stayed on the shelves. It also helped us gather our thoughts about social enterprise, about what works and what doesn't. Finally, teaching the class gave us the opportunity to spend time with a group of truly inspiring students at Berkeley. We both finished the class feeling ready to do it again next year!

One of our biggest takeaways outside of the content: The world of social entrepreneurship is changing rapidly and attracting lots of talent from a wide variety of disciplines. In fact, when we went to grad school (which for at least me was not that long ago) courses in this area were just beginning to emerge and there were few with practical field experience. That landscape is changing quickly with a proliferation of academic institutions offering classes and rapidly growing internship and employment opportunities. That is good news.

Last week I ordered a wedding gift for my brother and sister in law from an artist whose work was posted on Etsy. I included a note with my order, mentioning that the set of pottery was meant as a gift and requesting that the pieces match. I immediately received a note from the potter assuring me that the pieces looked beautiful together and asking if I wanted her to send an accompanying card with the gift.

Dierdre, of Down to Earth Ceramics, has continued to provide me with incredible customer service. She refunded the difference between the shipping estimate and the actual shipping costs, she included a handwritten card with the gift, she checked in to ensure that the gift arrived on time and in tact, and sent me a handwritten note thanking me for my purchase.

My experience with Etsy and Down to Earth Ceramics has been so remarkable that I felt the need to mention it on my blog. It truly has been an example of fantastic service design.

I wanted to recap the Social Capital Markets conference with a few lessons that I heard repeatedly.

- Models can scale if they are profitable - profitability drives scalability.

- The economic situation hasn't yet impact the social investing space or the philanthropic sector to the same extent that it has affected the private sector. Everyone is holding their breath to see if the impact is delayed or if this sector is protected from it.

- Metrics and transparency are necessary for investors to be able to compare deals. No one has really figured out how to measure social impact.

- Social enterprises are aiming for profits, but not profit maximization.

- Investing for impact or social investing is real and it's here to stay.

- Social investing is still done at a small scale. This is due to a number of reasons, but a big one is that there aren't enough deals to be made.

- There's lots of excitement about the growth of investing for impact and the industry feels like it's finally coming together to collaborate and raise all boats.

This is the blog post I wrote for NextBillion.net.

Fully admitting my bias here, I did think the Design in the Developing World panel at SoCap 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 Envirofit 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.

I've been an absolutely terrible blogger recently. It's always on my to do list, and somehow never happens. But today at the Social Capital Markets conference at Fort Mason in San Francisco, I was inspired to put down some thoughts.

First, the number of attendees at the conference is truly overwhelming. The organizers expected 250 - 300 and saw 500 people today. Every room was packed and the excitement about the interest in this event was overflowing. Not only are there alot of people at the conference, there's a great group of people. I've seen so many familiar faces, people from VisionSpring, Acumen Fund, the Skoll World Forum, and the University of Michigan BoP conference. It's been so much fun catching up with professional friends who I run into at these types of events a couple times a year.

Second, in such a horrible economic situation, there is still a real sense of optimism about social investing. I'm not sure we know if this is because the affects of the markets just haven't been felt on this sector yet, or if social capital markets truly are insulated from the financial troubles. At a time when all conversations about the future sound fairly negative, it's nice to be in a place where people are hopeful and encouraged by the changes they're seeing.

I'm blogging for Nextbillion.net tomorrow about the Design in the Developing World panel and will post that here. In the meantime, check out the other posts from the conference bloggers.

Once again, it's time to apply for the Acumen Fellows program. I was in the first class of fellows and highly recommend the program. My year in Kenya was fantastic and I learned so much about social enterprise, leadership, storytelling, and new ways of thinking. Please spread the word and apply online.

For anyone interested in social investing or social enterprise, I highly recommend attending the Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco October 13 - 15. For more information, visit the website.

Design21 wrote a nice feature piece about design for social impact and IDEO's efforts.

I'm doing the 3-Day Breast Cancer walk in about a month and am trying to meet my fundraising goal of $2,200. I'll walk 60 miles in 3 days.

I'm looking for a few more friends and contacts to sponsor me. Please consider giving http://08.the3day.org/site/TR/Walk/SanF ... fr_id=1188

Thanks!

I received the email below from Catherine Casey, a current Acumen Fund fellow living in Nairobi. It's a great update on how things are going in Kenya. Enjoy!
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Dear friends,

It's winter in Nairobi, and the two suitcases of clothes I arrived with in November are no longer enough to keep me warm. I had no desire to spend $200 for a tacky coat in Woolworths, where prices are sky high because of import taxes, so last weekend I set out for Toi Market on the outskirts of the Kibera slum. I picked up a coffee at Java House in the 'mall' on Ngong Road, and made my way down the side streets to the market.

Toi has always fascinated me – with nearly 5,000 vendors, many of whom live in Kibera, it serves a rare mix of Nairobi's highest and lowest income residents. None of the vendors have formal business licenses, but they have developed community savings schemes to get small loans and band together in negotiations with the government. Customers come to buy staple foods, and search for bargain prices on used designer labels and classic old t-shirts with logos like "Mt. Pleasant Little League." It's an incredible place. Read More...

Last week, my colleague Aaron Sklar, and I presented our work on Design for Social Impact at Rockefeller Foundation. We were amazed by the turnout - design firms, consulting firms, NGOs, universities, the government, all came out to talk about how design can play a role in the social sector.

We're excited about the possibilities and about thinking about how we could mobilize the design industry to get more involved in addressing some of the world's largest problems. We've posted our work and hope to engage in more conversations about it. Check it out here.

IDEO's CEO, Tim Brown, wrote an article for June's Harvard Business Review. This is a great introduction to design thinking. The article is the third link from the top http://hbr.com

The short answer is you can donate some money for relief. Organizations I'd recommend are Doctors Without Borders or Foundation for the People of Burma. Both organizations are getting food and supplies into the country.

For a first-hand account from a friend of a colleague, Read More...