Dr. Carol Dahl is the Executive Director of The Lemelson Foundation, leading the Foundation’s work to use the power of invention to improve lives. The Foundation inspires and enables the next generation of inventors and invention-based enterprises to promote economic growth in the U.S., and help solve social and economic problems for the poorest populations in developing countries.
As the founder and CEO of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, Bill Drayton has pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship, growing a global association of nearly 3,000 leading social entrepreneurs who work together to create an “Everyone a Changemaker” world.
We sat down with these two fascinating leaders in a unique opportunity to chat about the intersection of invention and social entrepreneurship.
Ashoka: Why is the intersection of invention and social entrepreneurship so important?
Carol Dahl: Inventions can play a critical role in addressing social need, but they require a pathway to mature into products and ways for those products to get to those who need them the most. Entrepreneurs and businesses play equally critical roles in ensuring that life-changing inventions and technologies don’t just sit on shelves. We recognize that invention can have the greatest impact in developing countries when an environment is fostered that nurtures and celebrates individuals and organizations that create high-quality, user driven, invention-based businesses that address social needs.
Ashoka: What is an important trend in invention-entrepreneurship in developing countries in the past five years?
Bill Drayton: There has been an increasing recognition of the importance of user-centered design that helps ensure that state of the art science and engineering is developed with the end user’s psychology, context, and needs in mind. This was the central lesson learned by the early appropriate technology movement: Inventions designed by engineers failed unless they were designed for and with the client. Moreover, one has to, with the client, understand the full lifecycle. How many billions of dollars have been wasted by putting in biogas facilities in villages without thinking through social attitudes towards waste or who would do the repair and maintenance? This is where social entrepreneurs are critical; their chief genius is in redesigning human systems. This focus on the user, combined with a strong self-sustaining business proposition, are the keys to building a successful invention-based social enterprise.
Take, for example, India’s Ashoka Lemelson Fellow Pradip Sarmah. He took a casual conversation with a rickshaw puller and saw a need that became an opportunity to transform the lives of those pullers. In talking to the pullers, Pradip understood that they rarely make enough to buy their own rickshaws, which then led Pradip to deeper conversations with other rickshaw pullers. Ultimately, Pradip was able to develop the Rickshaw Bank which provides opportunities for pullers to eventually own their own rickshaws, while also working with engineering students to reinvent the rickshaws themselves, making them lighter, safer, stronger, and capable of bringing in additional revenue through advertising. For the first time they also protect the puller from the elements. It’s this kind of deep and iteratively developed understanding of user needs that we’re finding is integral to developing strong invention-based enterprises like the Rickshaw Bank.
Ashoka: What are some of the most transformative examples of invention-entrepreneurship that you’ve seen in the last five years? What makes these examples inspiring, and what can we learn from them?
Drayton: I think the most important development is the growing number of teenage inventors/social entrepreneurs. Once one has achieved one’s power by actually changing the world at 14 or 17, one will be an entrepreneur for the good for life.
Take the example of Eden Full, who as a young teen began developing solar equipment that will aim at the sun over the course of the day without using any electricity to do so (using the differential expansion and contraction rates of different metals as the day warms and cools). Her invention reaps 40% more solar energy and has now been demonstrated in Africa as well as in prototype in the U.S.
This is the most personally satisfying part of my work. There is nothing as magical as watching someone get his/her power and also develop the confidence and values to serve the good of everyone.
Dahl: For me, the ones that are probably the most exciting are ones that are just emerging with the value proposition that can – or already does – affect millions. These are social enterprises like IDE India, which has reached out to over 1.25 million small holder farms with low cost technologies like drip irrigation that enable farmers to earn more money, thus improving the quality of their lives. Likewise, d.light designs is a social enterprise that designs, manufactures, and distributes solar lighting and power products enabling millions of families in 40 countries to have access to affordable and reliable power that also improves lives by reducing reliance on harmful lighting alternatives like kerosene.
Lately, we’ve also been very excited by a start-up company called Sanergy, which is working in the heart of Nairobi slums to provide access to adequate sanitation through a network of small, modular, prefabricated “Fresh Life” sanitation centers that provide basic services like a hot shower and a clean toilet. What’s exciting about Sanergy is that their solution goes beyond other sanitation centers, which often use large septic tanks of deep pits that eventually let waste to leach into the water table. Instead, Sanergy is using cutting edge technology and smart design to convert the waste into organic fertilizer which can be turned around and sold at a profit. Eventually, Sanergy hopes to also develop the systems to convert the waste into biogas and then into electricity, which could be sold to the national grid.
Ashoka: What is the future of the invention-entrepreneurship space (the challenges and opportunities)?
Drayton: The central force redefining the strategic environment for all of us is the simple fact that the rate of change has been growing exponentially since at least 1700. In other words, the new game is: change begets and accelerates change. As a result, we must organize in fluid, open teams, because now we’re serving a kaleidoscope of interconnected and constantly changing groups – and must constantly be changing our team of teams to do the best possible job.
In this world, you can’t afford to have anyone on your team who isn’t a changemaker. You need everyone to understand the environment and contribute to adapting to it. You also need people who are going to be able to work in constantly changing combinations.
Dahl: There are an unlimited number of ingenious ideas that can yield inventive solutions that can also turn into financially viable businesses. But we do see a limited set of people who have the ability to identify these opportunities combined with the skills and training to develop invention-based social enterprises. So the real opportunity is to build an ever-increasing pipeline of inventors and entrepreneurs who understand how invention can tackle the world’s big problems. This is done by 1) integrating awareness of how to identify problems worth solving into the education process; 2) equipping students with the important science, technology, engineering, and math skills needed to turn their ideas into inventions; and 3) equipping them then with the knowledge of how to find a great business proposition so they can turn ideas and inventions into a healthy business through entrepreneurship.
