Making Innovation Contagious

Utopia in the developmental world can be visualized as the existence of a vast array of 'copy, tailor and paste' programs, where sustainable social innovations are being massively replicated across low-income communities, and the capital markets are seeing enough opportunity to trade in the sector. What would drive this ability to scale though would be an abundance of openly-available success stories and lessons learned. And what would allow for such successes in the first place would be a relentless focus on collaboration, as opposed to competition, by social entrepreneurs and their sponsors. Collaboration in specifics is the essence of what will scale social impact, and set it apart from the purely commercial world that is obsessed with capturing value primarily for shareholders.

Below I provide one such exemplar of a firm that is not only creating social impact, but also building us one more rung on the ladder leading to impact-at-scale. This is an innovator delivering open-source 'social IP' for achieving market scale, to be distinguished from those providing open-source to enable the infrastructure of an enterprise.

Digital Green has created a platform that attracts low-income farming communities to using video and web 2.0 to record their best practices, and distribute the content to benefit others with similar problems. When I met their founder, Rikin Gandhi, he described how they tap into pre-existing social networks and emotional incentives to create a participatory process for content production, build a digital video database, and use local facilitators to disseminate content and training. And most significantly, and in their own words, "Digital Green has an open model for dissemination of content so that they are freely available, by everyone, for use." Digital Green is apparently 10 times more effective than classical methods, per dollar spent, in converting farmers to better farming practices. The Gates Foundation has funded the project in a big way to scale the idea across 1,000 villages.

Such an innovation could be partnered with for creating all sorts of value in other sectors such as energy, health, education. One example would be a large producer of biofuels in India partnering with Digital Green to actively engage with farmers (and the complexity fraught National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) to produce Jatropha, Pongamia, Neem and other feedstock, while creatively sustaining their livelihoods during the gestation period of the crops. Another example would be low-cost primary educators using the platform to paraskill and mentor language and mathematics teachers. And finally, social venture funds may piggyback on this medium to openly share information on their portfolio companies, especially at milestones and exit.

'Sharing' and 'connecting' projects such as Digital Green provides a much-needed multiplier effect to the successes of social enterprises, and complements the research papers, blog articles, social networking tools, conferences, social-return metrics, and advocacy conducted by experts in the arena. The Rikin's of this world are in effect the second-order Linchpin evangelists for social innovators and micro-entrepreneurs. And they will help trigger successes that are large enough to eventually impact developmental policy.

-vikram