I recently got a real taste of what this means as we looked at the social sector landscape in India.

As technology innovators, we are naturally excited by new ideas and, in India, my team was pushing for ground-breaking innovation in health care delivery. We wanted to integrate a new range of patient-centric home medical devices for monitoring and diagnosis using a hosted cloud-based service (built over a connected infrastructure), and to establish a centralized service for remote management. It was a rude shock to learn that while we were advocating the use of the latest cloud, M2M, and mobile technologies, the existing system had not yet applied even two-decade-old basic computing technologies. Many of the ongoing health care programs we observed still used hand-filled paper forms for data-entry and tracking. Within one organization, which ran a pre- and post-natal assessment program, it was open knowledge that data entered by community health workers was rarely monitored, compiled, or acted on.

No wonder it was not easy to measure the success or impact of the program, or to plan for improvements. Timing, resources, effort, and costs were far from optimal, and so much could change—both in quality and effectiveness—through better management of technology we already have available, such as mobile, real-time data entry applications connected to a central server or applications that extract data from central databases to create reports and dashboards.

In contrast, we also came across smaller initiatives that were using “the latest” technologies, including Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA), which provides low-income new and expectant mothers in India, South Africa, and Bangladesh with vital health information via mobile phones using SMS and voicemail.

While immensely useful for MAMA participants, technologies like these are insufficient to radically impact the landscape. Technology is still in the hands of a limited few, and effort is needed to broaden the reach.

We are at an interesting stage of social evolution and technology maturity, and it’s time to step back and re-consider our priorities. While new technologies continue to surprise us with their vision and possibility, there is a great deal of untapped potential in consistently applying existing technologies to support, and in fact, direct social change.

Our focus needs to move away from technology innovation to technology application. We should look for solutions—tested and proven in other business sectors like finance, travel, retail, etc.—to build innovative applications for the social sector. This approach will save us from the overhead costs of introducing new technology, as well as temper the complexity and risk. However, this still requires a new outlook to service delivery and innovative business processes; more specifically, it requires a focused effort to manage and direct technology in areas that lead to effective, widespread social change.

The first step is to define a common framework for technology integration, and to apply that uniformly and consistently across all social initiatives. We should keep in mind that technology can emerge as a tool for social development only if it helps to achieve five goals for any social program—these parameters can be used to to gauge the readiness, relevance, and impact potential of new initiatives.

1. Extend reach. Access should extend beyond a limited few to millions through improved and diversified access technologies—for example, reach low-income users who have low-end feature phones with SMS and simple voice messaging, and reach smartphone users with existing apps.

2. Improve services. This can be done by driving new service delivery models that take advantage of geographical and resource gaps. For example, cloud and hosted services can deliver expertise and information to remote regions, providing accurate and otherwise unavailable diagnosis and treatment in health care.

3. Facilitate adoption. Build on convenience, and make it easier and more fun for users to employ technology anytime, anywhere; introduce easy-to-use mobile applications, one-click user interfaces, and other simply designed tools.

4. Deliver relevance. Provide targeted services that tailor to the specific needs of each group. For example, a service to remotely monitor the physiological symptoms for post-operative care reduces health care costs significantly while improving patient comfort and experience. (Note that a service like this requires an integrated arrangement between the patient and the service provider, where the needs and pain-points are well understood on both sides.)

5. Reduce cost. Introduce efficient, optimized processes. For example, use of digital forms  and implementation of real-time data mining and analytic applications can ensure timely action on data and improve the overall return on investment. Use of technology can facilitate automation and reduce overheads.

Internet communication is driving the creation of a connected society, and the growing reach of the mobile phone gives us the opportunity to integrate larger populations into our global, connected society. Together, Internet and mobile provide a platform that has the potential to drive rapid social change unlike any other in history. We can achieve far more than we have by using these technologies as an infrastrcuture to transform education, health care, energy, agriculture, and the environment.

A closing example: In a country like India, the biggest challenges to education are making skilled teachers available in remote areas, and addressing issues around geographical diversity, proximity, and access. Right now, no one is looking at creating a new education delivery channel to facilate virtual classrooms and long-distance learning—that’s despite a government initiative to put Aakash tablets (government-sponsored $50 tablets) into the hands of every one of India’s 220 million school and college students.

It is critical to ensure that we take full advantage of current technologies. It is time for us to recognize that it is in our hands to manage and make the most of existing technology to drive effective, widespread change. Simple ideas can drive local, regional, national, or even global impact on social issues.

Recently, I wrote about a pair of questions that social entrepreneurs should be addressing when “Constructing the Case for Impact Investment.” Here is a third question that social entrepreneurs should also be thinking about and, while this questions relates to an issue that we have seen arise constantly, it should be noted that it does not apply to all social enterprises.

Question #3: How committed is the business to the impact—is it truly impact first? Note here that I am referring to the “business” rather than the management team because there may be other stakeholders (e.g., earlier investors) who have a say in charting the course of a social enterprise. It might seem that this question is fairly obvious, but I am thinking about a specific instance in which this question comes up in the BoP context— where there are multiple revenue streams and/or business lines.

When I talk to entrepreneurs outside the impact and social enterprise space, I love to talk about monetization strategies. My standard advice is that investors love to see multiple bites at the apple when it comes to revenue because it means the following: a) the entrepreneurs are actually thinking about revenue (though that’s not always the case, unfortunately), and b) for my analysis, I only need to find one revenue source to believe in, even if several or many others will not pan out. Put another way, you can show me a dozen revenue streams and I just need to buy into one as viable. Then, as an investor, we will work together to make sure resources are allocated where they belong (that is to say, the best combination of likelihood of success and potential magnitude). That’s part of what a good investor brings to the table. Yet, at first glance, it is nice to have a variety of potential revenue streams in the mix.

Again, the picture looks very different when making an impact investment, especially for the BoP market. We often find social enterprises with a primary focus on a product or service that has an “impact,” but that can subsequently be altered and adapted for mass markets outside the developing world. At first blush, this strategy sounds solid. Furthermore, our approach might contrast with other investors who do not see this issue as a potential problem. However, at the iiSummit in Chicago over the summer, there was a great investor panel where the conversation included concerns of impact being “shut down” post-exit by acquiring companies. Echoing these sentiments, I can confidently say that there is real anxiety in the impact space surrounding this issue on the investor side.

Given our focus on the BoP consumer, we are even more concerned than others about distractions from impact. Moreover, these concerns extend to pre-exit scenarios where securing an exit strategy could also result in shutting down impact. Our philosophy requires that investments need to be more than simply socially responsible, but also committed to the BoP consumer’s welfare. This philosophy is a long-term goal that will outlive any financial returns. That’s why we challenge any business we look at to answer the question of: it is truly “impact first”?

Here’s why we worry: imagine that the potential of the “impact” business line stalls or fades out, but the mass market opportunity remains. We call this problem the “REI-problem” because the first time our fund discussed this topic, it was in the context of a business that was creating a product to be used in rural India, but had plans for a second product (an adapted model) that could be sold to outdoor recreational enthusiasts in the developed world. Since we could see that product doing well on the shelves at the REI, it begged the question: are we comfortable funding a product that will be sold to this audience for their camping and hiking adventures and, if the BoP line failed, only to this audience? The answer for us is a resounding no.

This is not to say, we will not invest in a business with non-impact revenue streams or business lines. Yet, it has implications for secondary revenue opportunities. These opportunities must be truly secondary, and we have to be convinced that the business is impact-first and foremost. It should also be noted that the REI-problem rears its head in situations that are less obvious and require much more consideration than described in the example above.

It should be said that we can address our uncertainty around this issue in a variety of ways, including (among others): the management team’s commitment to the target (geographic) market (see Question #1), and the target audience; the height of the impact upside; and the strength of the business strategy and business model related to the impact business line(s).

In conclusion, this question, along with the two questions discussed previously, represents the start of a conversation between an impact investor and a social entrepreneur on topics of deep importance to the nature of the impact and the company’s ability to see it through execution. Impact investing is about long-term investing and investing beyond exit. Hopefully, thinking about these questions will help keep social investors and entrepreneurs on the same page.

Read the first post in this series, “Constructing the Case for Impact Investment.”

It is nothing new to say that the Internet is a tremendous resource for gathering information. However, when it comes to starting a business, entrepreneurs in particular have the benefit of digging up a wealth of articles and blog postings from a vital audience: investors. Interestingly, investors seem to be a fairly vocal class of Internet participants whether it comes to formal articles, blog posts, or even tweeting on Twitter. Seems investors love giving unsolicited advice.

As an early-stage investor, I enjoy reading what other investors have to say on topics from valuation to deal terms to the state of a particular sector. Some of the angel investors who keep blogs have a knack for writing such excellent, insightful pieces on early stage investing that the posts could just as easily be required reading in any business school course on entrepreneurship. However, in the impact space, there isn’t much information applying general startup topics to the unique challenges and idiosyncrasies of investing in the developing world and, especially, for the benefit of bottom of the pyramid consumers (the three billion people who live on less than $2.50 per day).

With that in mind, here is a pair of questions that all social entrepreneurs need to be thinking about when approaching impact investors and making the pitch for investment capital. I have singled out these questions because of the frequency at which they arise in our discussions as we screen potential BoP-focused investment opportunities. Bear in mind, these are not the only questions social entrepreneurs need to think about, but simply important ones that have special complexities in relation to the BoP marketplace.

Question #1: What is the management team’s commitment to the target (geographic) market? As with any investment, impact or otherwise, the analysis starts and ends with the management team. Outside of social enterprises, an investor wants to see an entrepreneur go all in. Usually, that comes in the form of a financial commitment and time commitment. “Quit your job, mortgage your house”—that’s the level of commitment some (perhaps, many) traditional investors want to see.

Social entrepreneurs focusing on the developing world need to show this level of commitment—and more. We tend to see a lot of US-based companies that operate (or will operate) in developing nations. That is certainly all right, but there are a number of questions that arise out of situations like this one. If the entire management team is located in the US, who is on the ground overseeing operations? Furthermore, if the going gets tough, how do we know they will stay? What partners do they have in the region? What ties do they have to the geography, and how strong and/or permanent are those ties? Social entrepreneurs have to answer these questions. However, I can count on one hand the number of business plans and presentations that offer a thoughtful discussion to address these issues. Instead, the focus is on items of traditional significance, such as management’s pedigree. Bottom line is that when it comes to evaluating a management team in the impact space, I say this: pedigree is actually far less compelling than relevance. The question of commitment to the target (geographic) market gets to the core of a management team’s relevance.

Question #2: Will consumers accept the product or service being offered? Obvious, right? After all, customer acceptance is part of any good business model. Actually, when the focus is on the BoP consumer, this question rises in importance and therefore requires far more consideration than the standard business strategy might require.

There is plenty of literature out there about design theory for products and services aimed at BoP consumers. If you are a social entrepreneur focusing on the BoP audience, get familiar with this issue and, importantly, how it applies to your social enterprise. Again, the bottom line is this: BoP consumers in the developing world will not simply buy a better mousetrap just because it’s better. In most cases, the majority of your target audience is not using the current mousetrap, and conventional notions of value propositions and payback periods won’t sway those who are. Explaining why BoP consumers will accept your product or service in the unique context you are providing it is crucial.

Linking Questions #1 and #2. When it comes to customer acceptance, nothing beats field trials and seeing the product in action. Successful or not, meeting the market, learning what it has to say, and using that information to refine everything from the product’s core features to the overall business model is part of building a viable enterprise. This is true in any sense, but given the nature of the customer acceptance issue with BoP consumers, it is of the utmost importance. We will always want to know about your beta customers, what they have to say, and whether any of them were so pleased with your product that they became evangelists for you and helped sell others during the field trial or initial launch period.

Naturally, the commitment of the management team is key to this process. In order to feel the full effect of meeting the market, the management team has to be there, on the ground, learning and gathering feedback first-hand. Not only do we have suspicions about the veracity of field trial results not conducted by the management team, but we have doubts about whether the feedback from it will be incorporated as it should be. As you can tell, social entrepreneurs who successfully answer question #2 will be able to support and back up their answer to question #1. When you have done your homework on the customer and show how your design will resonate with the target audience, you can construct a compelling narrative that not only articulates your commitment to the audience, but resonates with impact investors as well.

Read part two of this series, “Investing Beyond Exit.”

It’s as if we have woken up all at once—not just to the scariness of the challenges we face, but to the realization that we are not powerless to fix social problems and that deep satisfaction and well-being comes from working for good instead of just working. Take this year’s fellows at PopTech, the annual ideas and innovation conference in Camden, Maine. There was Michael Murphy, who has re-imagined the practice of architecture to heal whole communities, and Rose Goslinga, who has designed a way to insure 22,000 small-acre farmers in Kenya against crop failure.

But because social innovation is everywhere, it’s also all over the place. New silos of experts crop up all the time, each slightly restating the jargon. Added to the confusion of similar words, conflicting methods complicate and make simple truths obscure. The race to impact and scale often ignore business fundamentals; and there is not enough focus on unintended consequences. We are accelerating, incubating, and funding on the fly—before we know what works. Talk of collaboration is constant, but talk is still cheap and we continue to struggle within the organizational boundaries of the industrial age we’re trying to shake.

Now add design: the ability to create what’s new, and lead diverse teams through the creative process; to connect, integrate, see systems; to simplify, identify, and convey meaning; to tell stories; to visualize the unimaginable; to build and introduce order through beauty and elegance. Design allows an outsider to be “stupid” in all the right ways—by listening and observing. And that’s just the invisible part, before designers create artifacts that speak to mass audiences and create movements.

So far, though, while the d.school at Stanford and Amy Smith’s D-Lab at MIT have pioneered interdisciplinary programs that teach design thinking, there has not been a comprehensive MFA program to prepare visual designers to enter the world of social innovation—no learning path to a fully integrated role. Design has been for the most part just one more siloed discipline, a “nice to have” input after the technology and business strategy are in place.

Design can make a game-changing contribution to social innovation, but to do that, designers need a way to immerse themselves in the contexts where social innovation happens, acquire the skills they need to play a leading role, and a means to facilitate the process and foster collaboration. The big opportunity is to apply the creativity, skills, vision, and methods of design to the entire process of social innovation—to work from inside the system, helping people see the same things, connect the silos, and make sense of problems by making them imaginable and accessible. Design helps define a path forward. It untangles the complicated processes and players, helping us map what’s working and where.

Design for social innovation includes the design of everything: from conversations, communication campaigns, experiences, structures, technology platforms, systems, products, business models, strategies, art, and culture. It incorporates all traditional and new design disciplines and mediums— identity, interactive, film, product, movement, and game design. It has the potential to be the single integrating force we need to take on the challenges we face—systemically and sustainably.

We’re launching the MFA Program in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for the most practical reason of all: we see a tremendous need, and no other way to get there. If social innovation is our relationship with purpose, design is the means and the method to make that purpose manifest. That’s what we plan for our graduates to do, from inside corporations, communities, governments, entrepreneurial enterprises, and nonprofits.

Author and thinker Daniel Pink said that MFA is the new MBA. We believe that the goal is not to replace one degree with the other, or to further divide those that earn them, but to see that creativity and visual thinking are equally important and vital to successful endeavors.

Social innovation needs practitioners who are creative, visual, passionate, broadly curious, generalists, integrators, listeners, systems thinkers and doers, and people who know how to create lives filled with both success and purpose. It needs designers.

1. Be Weird. Why does no one usually talk about this? Why isn’t there more about weirdness in articles on innovation? Is there some conspiracy of silence against change and the strange? If you innovate, at first people think you’re weird. Period. There are the awkward meetings, perplexed relatives, baffled friends trying not to raise an eyebrow. You have to get used to feeling a bit like an “emo” teenager in a school full of cheerleaders—or vice versa. I asked Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, who is pioneering digital health care through Patients Know Best, about what the doctors he interviewed in his years of software development thought of him. “Weird,” he laughed. “Yes, they thought I was weird.”

2. Moan. Generally at events people try to out-dazzle each other and show the world their greatest hits. But at the Do Lectures it was warts ‘n’ all. Just as inspiring as the lectures were the one-to-one talks, a few glasses of wine in, when speakers would share honestly the toughness, the difficulty, their struggles, and the uncertainty. To hear that people doing amazing things don’t always feel amazing was strangely inspiring. Somehow empathizing with their difficulties put their achievements in reach. I’m no advocate of complaining, but sometimes being honest about our vulnerabilities can inspire more than we might think.

3. Start before you’re ready. The Do Lectures took place in the beautiful fforest camp, all exquisite geodesic domes, log burning stoves, reindeer hides, and a hidden sauna. The craft and artistry of the place was breathtaking. But the thing I loved most about fforest, is that it’s not quite finished yet. Walk up the hill, through the gardens, and you’ll discover old dusty barns, a boarded up house, and some rusty machinery. I loved that the two can coexist together. So often I don’t begin projects because everything isn’t ready. I think how much we would have lost if the folks at fforest waited until every barn was converted and every wall painted before opening to the public. It’s a great metaphor. Begin now, share what you’ve got, and mend the roofs as you go along.

4. Value learning over knowledge. For me, learning has always been a means to an end. We learn to know things—right? And somewhere deep in my subconscious I thought that when I became a grown-up, I’d stop learning and start teaching (because grown-ups know). Alistair Smith, one of the UK’s leading trainers in modern learning methods, provided a revolutionary perspective on education, helping me see that learning isn’t a sign of immaturity—quite the opposite, actually. He outlined an approach that values the process of learning itself: Learn to learn; knowledge is simply a by-product. “Learn, unlearn, relearn.” The nail in knowledge’s coffin was provided by this Eric Hoffer quote, “In times of change, the learners will inherit the earth, while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

Innovation is necessarily messy. Most of the time it doesn’t take place in gleaming purpose-built labs with groups of geniuses hi-fiving each other as they surf the waves of change. Most of the time it involves flawed human beings making it up as they go along, starting before they are ready, and stumbling along the way.

In a sector where we are always trying to do more with less, we can’t be fooled into thinking our strategies for engagement on online networks can be cut and pasted from one space to the next. Here are a few reasons why using multiple social networking platforms doesn’t just mean you repeat your effort.

Community First

Who is using the platform? Is your community largely tech-savvy early adopters? So far, the demographics of Google+ skew toward American males working in technology. By last month, the user ratio between male and female had come up to about 70/30 and the country with the second highest number of users was India at about 13 percent. One of the core principles in community engagement is to use the tools your community is using. If your community meets offline at a local watering hole to share opinions and make plans, don’t bother setting up a Twitter account with the purpose of influencing them. But if they congregate online, on a community news site or blog network, join them in conversation there.

It’s the same with any platform. Pay attention to your community. If they are using the tool, then join them. If they’re not, it’s OK to wait—especially if time and energy are scarce.

The Price of Early Adoption

Organizations that joined Facebook early on endured the “price of early adoption”—they were the guinea pigs for a platform that was still figuring out just what to do with this form of user. Just as Facebook experienced users putting an organizational profile into the system designed for individuals, Google+ attempted to swiftly moderate nonindividual profiles and publicized an application form for first-round brand profiles once the functionality was available. Now that it is here and organizations are jumping in to create their profile on Google+, they’ll need to work through the kinks.

Changes, new functionality, and platform iterations will continue indefinitely—for better or worse. The difference is that in these early stages, changes could mean your investment literally disappears or you need to start over. As many have already complained, you cannot (for the moment, at least) share access to a brand page on Google+. If your current social media plan and strategy calls for staff transparency and shares responsibility across staff, Google+ may not work at the level you need just yet.

Apples and Oranges

Ultimately, though Facebook and Google+ (or any other networking platform for that matter) are both social networking tools, there are important differences. MySpace, Friendster, FriendFeed, Diaspora, Bebo, and others all offer plenty of fuel to the argument that comparing two social platforms has to go beyond the functionality of messaging, commenting, and connecting to your friends. The differences between the platforms are real and important to consider when deciding whether or not it’s a place where you can advance your goals—whether they’re engagement, communication, fundraising, or anything else.

For example, if your organization currently uses Facebook as a major channel for fundraising, you are probably actually using Causes—an application that runs within Facebook—for the management of the campaigns, communications, and donations. That’s an important clarification because it means that your strategy doesn’t use “Facebook” as the tactical level of implementation, and you can’t simply duplicate that on Google+ now. If, instead, you use a private group on Facebook to organize volunteers or champions who are instrumental to your fundraising efforts, but your activity, communications, and donations are taking place elsewhere, then creating a similar strategy for Google+ could work. It’s integral to the success of online efforts to recognize just where these various tools and platforms compare and where they are dramatically different.

What do you think? Are you using Google+ now and have you set up a profile for your organization? Please share the link and your thoughts about the experience so far!

One of the principal reasons impact investing is growing in popularity is the parallel rise in the number of social businesses that are being started. As entrepreneurs create more for-profit businesses that have strong social missions—such as Numi Organic Tea, Method Products, and New Leaf Paper (all certified B Corporations)—the opportunity for socially minded investors to invest in those businesses grows right along with it.

Not all impact investments are in for-profit companies, however. Many nonprofits also need access to investment capital, sometimes as standard loans, and other times in the form of creative financial products. The Nonprofit Finance Fund, for one, has played an important role in helping US nonprofits access this type of investment capital. Under its new CEO, former Rockefeller Foundation executive Antony Bugg-Levine, NFF is likely to push into new areas of impact investing. Bugg-Levine has been a prominent advocate of impact investing and is the co-author (along with Jed Emerson) of the new book Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making a Difference. To read a provocative review of his book, see “Shifting the Market.”

Impact investing is not just a US trend. It is growing in popularity around the world as well. For an interesting look at the first Brazilian social capital fund, read “Journey into Brazil’s Social Sector.” Leonardo Letelier, the founder and CEO of Sitawi, recounts his experiences creating and operating the fund. Sitawi has provided more than $1 million in loans to a range of Brazilian social enterprises, including a community bank, a handicraft collective, and a poverty alleviation agency.

For an extensive look at impact investing, read “Roundtable on Impact Investing.” In this discussion, impact investing leaders from around the world discuss their experiences and the trends that they think are important. The participants include Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund; Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui, chairman of the Mexican microfinance bank Compartamos Banco and managing partner at the impact investing firm Ignia Partners; Asad Mahmood, managing director of Global Social Investment Funds at Deutsche Bank; and Iftekhar Enayetullah, co-founder and director of the Bangladesh social business Waste Concern.

And finally, for an account by a pioneer impact investor about his two decades of experience, be sure to read Roger Frank’s “Impact Investing: What Exactly Is New?” Frank provides an honest and often humorous look at the difficulties he has had getting investors to consider impact investing.

For over forty years, Sesame Workshop has had a singular mission: to empower the lives of children through media. But media changes, and the needs of children change as well. We know that the world is evolving, and that what benefits children today may not affect the children of tomorrow. At the Workshop, we claim that every season of Sesame Street is an experiment; the truth of this assertion, I believe, is borne out in our history.
 
As a research-based organization (we have always had a team of full-time educational researchers on staff), we are continuously refining our content to ensure that we are having the desired educational effect. We also investigate the issues of the day, to figure out where we—Elmo and Big Bird, Grover and Rosita—can make a difference in the lives of children. And while most people know of us for our work on literacy and numeracy, Sesame Workshop tackles topics affecting the whole child—a wide array of issues that families across America and around the world face.
 
In recent years, Sesame Workshop has worked to educate caregivers and children on issues ranging from asthma to disaster preparedness. We have helped parents and caregivers talk with their children about difficult topics, such as the grieving process. Internationally, there are scores of localized Sesame Street productions reaching children on all six inhabited continents, addressing issues such as HIV, malaria prevention, female empowerment, and of course, the ABCs—or, rather, their equivalent in dozens of languages.

Recently, we entered a new area: childhood hunger.
 
Hunger is an issue that is often times ignored. Some who suffer are held back by shame from getting help. Others simply do not know whom to ask, or where to go, for assistance. And because those at risk do not often vocalize their needs to others, hunger can be an invisible problem, even in your community.
 
With roughly 20 percent of American children—one in five!—not having enough to eat, the problem is truly widespread. Factor in the scores of other children not eating properly, and American hunger is a true epidemic and growing.
 
We here at Sesame Workshop have a unique opportunity. Through our Sesame Street Muppets, we are able to reach and engage with a wide audience—one of all ages. We can raise awareness for this vital children’s health issue by weaving the magic of Elmo, Grover, and their friends with the true-to-life stories of children and families who are battling every day to cope with the economic uncertainties that have wreaked havoc with their finances and dinner tables. We can make a difference.
 
And unlike the Sesame Street of yesteryear, when we were just a television program, today’s approach is multifaceted, as we adapt to the innovations in media that are the hallmark of our times. Through our Healthy Habits for Life initiatives, we have created content, kits, and tools that help grownups address hunger, exercise, and related topics with the children in their lives. And in October, we introduced our newest Sesame Street Muppet, Lily, on a television special titled Growing Hope Against Hunger. 
 
Growing Hope Against Hunger focused on the lives of children battling hunger. Lily, a new friend to Elmo and the gang, is going through the same trials and tribulations that many American children and their families are: more mouths to feed than food to go around. By sharing her story, Lily showed that there is not only no shame in being hungry, but that our communities can and often will come together to keep our neighbors and friends healthy, happy, and on the course toward better things. We mixed in real-life stories from families nationwide—true stories of hunger, perseverance, and hope—in an effort to remove the stigma of hunger in America.
 
But hunger—and for that matter, a child’s ongoing development more generally—require more than a prime-time television special. So, we do more. Through our partners and advisors, we distribute thousands of free outreach kits (in both English and Spanish) containing this content to children in need. Further, we make all of our outreach content available online, for free, on SesameStreet.org. And of course, there is still the Sesame Street you know and love, echoing these same themes every morning on your television.
 
As children move toward other forms of media, we will be there, too. We have an award-winning children’s website, smartphone apps, podcasts, educational video games, and more, all of which are focused on the same goal as the television show. As we all know, wherever there is a screen, there is a child. And if Sesame Workshop can reach that child, we can empower that child’s life.

We have well-developed tools for tackling social issues based on thoughtful analysis and technological inventiveness, but there has been something missing from the toolbox. We have not traditionally applied design thinking to this set of problems, yet design is a process especially suited to divergent thinking—the exploration of new choices and alternative solutions.

Design thinking is scalable and can be applied incrementally to improve existing ideas (such as how a service is delivered or how a product performs for the user) or it can be applied radically to create disruptive solutions that meet the needs of people in entirely new ways.

Safepoint founder Marc Koska was seeking to reduce the transmission of blood-born diseases through the reuse of syringes. He could have designed better packaging or communications to educate medical staff about the dangers of not properly disposing of used syringes. This approach might have helped in an incremental way. He chose instead to design an entirely new autodisabled syringe that breaks automatically after first use. This disruptive design has the potential to significantly reduce the more than 7 billion unsafe injections given every year.

Design thinking is accessible as an approach to innovation in a way that technical R&D is not. It can be applied by people from a broad range of backgrounds to problems ranging from creating new products and services to redesigning business processes, building new brands, and improving communications.

Design thinking is centered on innovating through the eyes of the end user and as such encourages in-the-field research that builds empathy for people, which results in deeper insights about their unmet needs. This focus helps avoid the common problem of enthusiastic “outsiders” promoting inappropriate solutions and ensures that solutions are rooted in the needs and desires of the community.

And how exactly do you go about it?

Ask a good question. The most important prerequisite to a good idea is a good question. When we face intractable social ills we are doomed to failure if we simply ask the same questions over and over again, expecting to receive different answers. The greatest entrepreneurs and creative problem solvers (social or otherwise) exhibit an ability to ask surprising and insightful questions.

Dr. G. Venkataswamy (Dr. V), founder of the remarkable Aravind Eye Care System that makes high-quality eye care accessible to low income customers, asked the question, “Why can’t the principles of McDonald’s be applied to eye care?” Asking this question led him to creative ideas about efficient, high-quality care that have had untold impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of the poor of South India.

Get close to the lives of those you are trying to serve. Understand their actual needs rather than posing a hypothesis about what they might need. All successful innovations balance the requirements of desirability (what people need), feasibility (what technology can do), and viability (what is sustainable or profitable). Design thinking starts with what is desirable, not what is feasible, in order to seek out the best opportunities to create value and impact for the user.

Build to think and launch to learn. Use prototyping, not speculation, to learn about the viability of ideas and to evolve them toward fitter solutions. Launch simple ideas early but structure to learn from these experiments and iterate the ideas quickly.

Through our work with a US-based consumer goods company, we tried to understand what people in rural Ghana would pay for in terms of health and beauty products. We asked many questions, but not until we set up a mock shop on the side of the road in a village did we understand that people would pay more for some higher-quality, branded products, such as vitamins and toothbrushes, and were reluctant to pay for others, such as detergent and toothpaste. This market knowledge allowed us to recommend a basket of goods, a pricing strategy, and a branding direction to the client, who has now effectively established a microfranchising business.

See the entire business system as a design opportunity. Products and services may be at the core of what poor people need, but often the surrounding infrastructure of distribution, communications and marketing, support services, and business models are the least well developed and offer the most potential for innovation.

In Kumasi, Ghana, we worked with Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor to design a toilet and system around it for in-home, urban sanitation. We first designed the service and business offering, which led to the pricing, branding, and, finally, design of the product. This offering is now being tested in 100 Kumasi households, with plans to expand to 10,000 households in the near future.

Teach a person to fish… Sometimes the end solution is not the only benefit of design thinking. We have found that designing effective tools for others to design with can have significant impact. Not every nonprofit has access to designers; indeed, there are far too few designers focused on solving challenges in the social sector. To help mitigate this deficit, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a project to create the Human-Centered Design Toolkit to act as a field guide for NGOs and non-profits looking to innovate. The toolkit has been downloaded well over 60,000 times and used to support projects such as the design of a maternal hospital in Nepal, a cooperative of weavers in Rwanda, water distribution management systems in Malawi, and hand washing stations in Vietnam.

Given the scale and diversity of social challenges facing us today, ranging from climate change to failing education systems to threatened food, water, and energy supplies, to chronic health “pandemics,” I would argue it makes sense to use every approach we have in the toolbox to seek out new solutions to improve the state of the world.

Read SSIR’s article, “Design Thinking for Social Innovation.”

We decided to analyze in depth one of the collaborative competitions pioneered by Ashoka’s Changemaker Initiative. As of 2010, the Changemakers Initiative had run more than 45 collaborative competitions on social and environmental issues, including maternal health, women and sport, drinking water and sanitation, and new media and tourism. Competition contributors include social entrepreneurs already selected by Ashoka, but the competition is open to everyone.

The competition follows a four-month schedule. The process is to identify the topic and its key questions; launch the competition online; invite online entries, comments, revisions, etc.; select up to 15 finalists by a jury (selected by the Changemakers Initiative); and then have the Changemakers community vote on the top proposals. The competitions are sponsored by companies and foundations, some of which offer further support after the competition ends.

We began our analysis. Drawing on recent work in sustainability science, we analysed the collaborative competitions as a public, open, dynamic, and reciprocal peer-review process: all entries and comments are publicly posted; anyone with Internet access can contribute their own idea or contribute to others’ ideas; contributors can respond to comments (this is potentially developmental, in that contributors can improve their entries in response to comments); and contributors are simultaneously reviewers. Due to our own research background in the water sector, we decided to examine the collaborative competition on the water and sanitation crisis.

What would we learn about collaborative spirit? There were 263 ideas presented by proponents from 52 different countries. In total, 694 comments were made. Out of the 263 entries, 143 were commented on. However, the distribution of comments was very skewed: Twelve entries received almost a third of all comments. No finalist responded to criticisms or suggestions. Thus, there did not seem to be evidence that the competition had improved the winning entries; or put differently, the jury and then the online community in the final vote did not consider participation in refining and enriching a necessary condition for winning the competition. This result was confirmed by an examination of four other collaborative competitions with different themes.

So are the collaborative competitions just competitive? No, we we also found evidence for reciprocity. About 60 percent, or 150 of 254 people, who posted an entry also commented on other entries. Less than a third of those who posted an entry (72) also replied to comments on their entries. Thus, some collaboration was in evidence—but not amongst the winners. However, one important thing to note is that these findings are limited—the method of analysis did not include collaboration by phone, email, in-person meetings, and other exchanges.

Innovation requires the carrying out of ideas, not just having them. The online competition gives global visibility to ideas. As the Changemaker team put it, “It surfaces them.” Our analysis suggests that using online competition as a way of making ideas visible to a worldwide community of people interested in change is the key innovative aspect of the collaborative competition, rather than the collaborative effort to improve proposals.

Still, strengthening the collaborative spirit could be achieved several ways. One way is to offer different awards. Contributions often range from speculative proposals to ideas that have already manifested in mature projects, thus a single category final makes the local soccer fan compete against the professional soccer player. Another thing to do is reward excellent commentators, or even invite schools or university seminars to actively comment on thematically close proposals. A third possibility is to change the rules of the games so that finalists must comment, and must respond to comments in the effort to further refine their proposal. Finally, we suggest making the link between proposals and comments clearly visible so that contributors and others can trace dialogue easily.

Of course, it is easy to make suggestions if you do not have to implement them yourself…but we have decided to explore the possibility of online (and offline!) collaboration further through the Big Jump Challenge. This competition will also focus on water (set to launch on March 22, 2012, World Water Day), and we’re developing it in co-operation with the betterplace lab, Viva con Agua, French social Entrepreneur Roberto Epple, the Grüne Liga, the Deutsche Umwelthilfe, and the Global Nature Fund.