Social Innovations
Lagging Imperialists in Social Entrepreneurship and How to Avoid Them
What is the proper role of the haves in helping the have-nots? That age-old debate is only recently coming into focus in the world of social entrepreneurship. A few weeks ago I wrote a post for Harvard Business Reviews blog asserting that the US is a laggard and not a leader in social innovation. With remarkable synchronicity, Bruce Nussbaum, a leading light in the design world wrote a post for Fast Company Design asking, “Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?” a few weeks later. Our posts, similar in nature, obviously touched a nerve, as evident in the comments (there’s also a good round-up of various blogosphere reactions here). While many people agreed, dissenters accused both Bruce and I of ignoring positive examples... (continue reading this blog post)
What is the proper role of the haves in helping the have-nots? That age-old debate is only recently coming into focus in the world of social entrepreneurship. A few weeks ago I wrote a post for Harvard Business Reviews blog asserting that the US is a laggard and not a leader in social innovation. With remarkable synchronicity, Bruce Nussbaum, a leading light in the design world wrote a post for Fast Company Design asking, “Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?” a few weeks later.
Our posts, similar in nature, obviously touched a nerve, as evident in the comments (there’s also a good round-up of various blogosphere reactions here). While many people agreed, dissenters accused both Bruce and I of ignoring positive examples, denying that the haves can do any good, and championing a defeatist “do-nothing” ethic.
I’d like to answer some of the charges by amplifying on my perspective.
The problem as I see it is a great number of social entrepreneurs (though by no means all), who ignore two fundamental rules of entrepreneurship, 1) Know your customer, and 2) Maximize your competitive/comparative advantage.
In the first case, I think we should be inherently skeptical (though not dismissive) of the developed world entrepreneurs’ understanding of customers/beneficiaries living in poverty elsewhere, no matter what their training or experience here. Too often we’re seeing “solutions” designed from afar based on a cursory understanding of the lives of the poor gleaned from simple statistics or quick field visits. When that happens, we see failures of the sort common in international aid recently epitomized by OLPC and PlayPumps. A great example of how distance from customers affects the way an entrepreneur thinks is evident in this “conversation” between Iqbal Quadir, founder of GrameenPhone and father of the cellphone revolution in the developing world, and Nick Negroponte, founder of OLPC. A close reading reveals plenty of the “Imperialist” mindset Bruce called out in his post. The core of imperialist thinking is the belief that “we” know better than “they.” The fact that the organizations making the biggest impact worldwide today, as I noted in my HBR post, are coming from “them” is powerful testament to the absolute requirement for knowing your customers. On a side note, the importance of local knowledge also means we should never run voting contests for social entrepreneurs.
The second rule applies not only to an entrepreneur’s company but to themselves. What is the competitive advantage of developed world social entrepreneurs and of the people who support them? Given that they are unlikely to have the best knowledge of customers, it’s almost certain that competitive advantage isn’t going to be in idea generation, at least of ideas that will work rather than just look elegant. It’s far more likely to be in supporting local people with ideas and helping them turn their ideas into companies, and growing those companies. That’s why I argued in the original piece that the US social entrepreneurship community should be far more focused on finding and funding ideas there than running contests and training people here. Though even this needs to be done with caution—plenty of entrepreneurs have learned the dangers of becoming too close to funders and too distant from customers.
None of this means that the haves don’t have a role in global social entrepreneurship or that it’s impossible for them to gain local knowledge and generate good ideas—it certainly doesn’t mean we in the developed countries should do nothing. It is an argument for partnership and collaboration between the haves and have-nots—but partnerships that recognize that the leadership must come from those who are closest to the customers.
There are good examples of such thinking already in practice—take for example the Legatum Center for Entrepreneurship and Development at MIT or the percentage of Unreasonable Ventures from the developing world. Like elsewhere in philanthropy, we need more good examples and fewer good intentions in social entrepreneurship and humanitarian design.
Tim Ogden is Executive Partner at Sona Partners, a thought leadership communications firm. He has edited 4 books on the intersection of business strategy and technology published by Harvard Business School Press and co-authored or ghostwritten several articles for Harvard Business Review. He is frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Financial Times. You can follow him on Twitter: @philaction or @timothyogden.
Simply putting boxes and lines down on paper doesn’t guarantee that your organization will make better decisions.
Long-term investment in organic agriculture will provide above-market returns, environmental impact, and—in the developing world—enormous social impact.
Q&A with KoAnn Skrzyniarz of Sustainable Brands.
Critics of Obamacare have taken away attention from important aspects of the act such as its focus on keeping people healthy.
The misalignment between the expansive goal of “health” and a cramped
Entrepreneurs are setting up shop in the nation's urban food deserts.
A riveting memoir by Egyptian revolutionary—and Google marketing executive—Wael Ghonim.
COMMENTS
BY Brigid
ON August 2, 2010 12:23 PM
I’ve been having a conversation about the value of marketing that resonates with what you are saying about “Know your customer.” Pro-marketing argues: we have the solution here for the developing world (be it philanthropic or social entrepreneurial). But people aren’t using it. Therefore, we must market to them the value of using the solution we designed for them.
But I’m cautious about this. Marketing assumes that the solution is correct but the people who should use it just don’t know any better. Whereas it could just as well be that the people who are supposed to use the product know well what they want, and the outsider’s product is not it.
Can see more of this conversation, with specific examples, here
BY Jeff Mowatt
ON August 2, 2010 12:42 PM
wassamatter with these people is what I thought when I kept seeing that conversation about humanitarian design. Are they agonising still about models and metrics?
I was just reading a Pamela Hartigan article about social investment reflecting that to me, it wasn’t anything new because we’d gone out and done these things after publishing the same script 14 years ago..
As a very small business we use profit to invest in ‘soft power’ research and advocacy in Eastern Europe spending the last decade taking ‘social enterprise’ or as we prefer people-centered economics into international development
http://people-centered.net/Services.aspx
If ‘Lagging Imperialists’ refers to those stuck on the first page just talking the walk, I’m with you.
BY Swapnil Chaturvedi
ON August 2, 2010 10:19 PM
I completely agree that “knowing the customer” is an important aspect, and I also agree that Social Entrepreneurs from developed world can “know their customers” through thorough anthropological research. Chip and Dan Heath give a great example of this in their new book “Switch”. As the story goes, when Jerry Sternin (Save the Children) arrives in Vietnam to find solution to the malnutrition problem, he throws away solutions suggested by previous scholars out the window. He then takes time to study the “bright spots” and then finds a solutions that reaches 2.2 million people in 265 villages. No research/brainstorming done in a laboratory in the developed world could have had such a massive impact. As C.K.Prahalad has said in his seminal paper “Innovation Sandbox”, the solutions for the bottom of the pyramid have to be developed using constraints. How will I understand those constraints unless I am spending a lot of time among my BOP customers. For example, my mother has arthritis. She keeps telling me about pain in her knees. How can I fully empathize with her (although I try my best) just by listening to her voice, unless I actually see the pain she feels when, say, walking up and down the stairs.
BY Jeff Mowatt
ON August 3, 2010 01:06 PM
Thanks to what Swapnil writes above I now understand what’s meant by design imperialism and can offer an illustration - from Harvard - that which inspired the David McLintick article ‘How Harvard Lost Russia’ where he concludes that they failed to introduce capitalism by overlooking democratic governance.
Arriving behind the economic collapse of 1998, although the idea of a bottom up strategy started with a theoretical construct of social capitalism, the project which was sourced in Tomsk was the result of research on the ground which identified key local social problems.
Consider the various advocates for reforming capitalism for example and consider how many of these are based on abstract intellectual exercise.
http://people-centered.net/Capitalism.aspx
BY Tim Ogden
ON August 3, 2010 03:27 PM
A new article from Fast Company provides a good illustration of what it takes to know your customer as a first world social entrepreneur. Asked about his process for starting new ventures, Al Hammond, a pioneer in the bottom-of-the-pyramid space says: “I get into an area, learn about it (usually working at an NGO) ***for 5 years or more***, understand what works and what the needs are, then an opportunity or potential solution occurs to me, and I do something about it.” [emphasis mine].
More at: http://bit.ly/bWstXi
If you’re working on a social problem and haven’t spent at least 5 years working in it/on it BEFORE you come to a potential solution, pause to wonder whether you know your customer well enough.