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January 29, 2010

Workshop Recap: Designing Solutions for Emerging Ecosystems

       
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Coming to the end of the week in Finland, the dust has now settled from our workshop on innovations for emerging markets this week at Aalto Design Factory (though the snow continues to fall) and there finally has been some time for reflection. First, a huge thanks goes out not only to my partner in this prototype, Niti Bhan, but to the generous team at the Design Factory and its leader, Kalevi Ekman as well. Without Niti's personality, her suggestion of the workshop, and her work within the Design Factory, none of it would have started. Without the DF team's generous support and interest, none of it would have actually happened. And from the workshop and the connections made, both human and cognitive, many positive things will surely emerge.

The Design Factory describes itself as a passion-based co-creation platform, which suited the day very well. Many people showed up in the dark Nordic morning to take part in this event because of their passion for combining design, innovation and social development. Because of this, collaborative creation of ideas was the key thread throughout the day. The blend of students, entrepreneurs, and people stepping out of their roles in private companies and government bodies—with both local values and global views—was exactly what was needed. We put the workshop here because, as Ekman pointed out before the event, Finland is uniquely positioned to leverage its skills, assets, energy, IP and unique social values to help solve serious problems and improve life elsewhere in the world. 

Niti and I took the first hour or so to describe the realizations from our respective roles and trajectories that brought us to this point—mine from the consumer culture side, hers from her field work experience and research in low income, challenging environments. Along the way, these trajectories met, and new patterns are now emerging, showing us possibilities of new ecosystems blending technology, social and cultural structures that are uniquely configured.

We were there just to set the table, however. The core of the day, and the best part of the workshop, was generated by the participants. Organized into teams, they were tasked with taking on a new unfamiliar roles, in new countries, cities and situations, and a unique set of external factors and barriers around which they needed to create a solution for a specific target user. It was fitting that took place within the Aalto Ventures Park facility, which itself is a converted workshop. With a variety of tools, materials and working styles, each created something uniquely suited to their task: water delivery systems that doubled as information networks, thoughtfully conceived community centers in conflict zones, a mobile platform for local jobs, and more. Each used the human networks already in place, and each contained multiple innovations worth considering alone. 

Given that our tendency today is to throw technology at problems in scattershot ways, most striking to me was how the groups constructed or leveraged existing networks and ecosystems giving only the lightest touch to technology—resulting in an appropriate simplicity and resilience in every solution. No hammers looking for nails, no new complexities created to suit potential capabilities, just carefully considered balance of tools and needs. If this was the only takeaway, it was a day well spent. Luckily, there was a lot more to leave with, not least a sense of momentum and whetted appetite—for us, for those who participated, and for the broader Aalto community as well.

 

Filed under  //   Aalto   BOP   BOPNet   co-creation   design   Design Factory   ecosystems   events   Finland   innovation   technology  
Posted by Scott Smith 

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January 8, 2010

Super Fakes, Open Source and Informal Channels of Innovation


Photo by Samout3

A recent string of interesting signals, including yesterday's New York Times post about the Chinese smartphone fake encountered at CES with the iPhone look, Android guts and faux HTC splashscreen may provide an interesting view of where innovation in mobile apps and services for emerging markets may come from in the near future. These signals tell me that we are approaching a point where said innovation is no longer just going to come from "official" device and application makers, but are starting to emerge from hidden development "dens" in places like China, Russia or Thailand as well as from Kenyan startups or American giants.

The numbers paint a story of probability. Somebody is actually counting and forecasting these illicit grey-market activities as best they can, and the most recent figures, from research house iSuppli, put Chinese grey market shipments at at least 145 million units for 2009. That's a growth rate of over 43% over 2008, and represents about 13% of global handset volume. This, at a time when the legit market has been slowing. And in those 145 million units, somewhere some interesting new innovations are taking place, and in the 145 million customers, some folks are getting what they want.

As Jan points out, at least a portion of these devices' buyers know what they are getting at purchase, and likely make their purchase decision based on a value for money tradeoff. They may be getting access to the (glancing) look and (approximate) feel of a smartphone, the cachet of the counterfeit brand, or, in the case of the Times example above (I suspect increasingly in the next few years) they are after some hybrid formulation of open source flexibility with proprietary look and feel. 

The latter effect is where we start to cross over into innovation territory it seems. In the past a hacker would have to reverse engineer or obtain a crack of an OS like Symbian, or fake up some melange of a platform to run on. Since the advent of an open source system like Android, which has allowed the legit developers to roll a mobile OS of their own, this is changing. One week it's HTC or Motorola making a new Android derivative and handset, the next it is Lucky Dragon's Mobiles 'R' Us with a smartphone/e-reader with MP3 playback. Or, more importantly, a device with apps written to suit local tastes, which presumably run beyond knock-offs into utility territory. If the big mobile companies aren't innovating for the grassroots fast enough, or can't be everywhere at once, the expertise gained over time in making passable hardware, combined with the ability to crank out a platform tuned to local tastes, puts Lucky's operations on a collision course with Moto or Nokia. Over time, this more responsive operation may win an increasing number of customers, as price and value converge. 

Imagine a time, five years hence, when West African developers creating apps for the specialized needs of the region crank out cheap Ivorian handsets from a customs-free, loosely governed black market zone like Bouake, where black market pirates roam free even today, making ersatz Arsenal tops and pseudo-Murakami LV backpacks. They will know the local market, they know how to make the supply chain run, and they can provide regional support. Not that far fetched.

Informal innovation, even illicit innovation, is nibbling around the edges now, just emerging on the radar. Whether its a no-name mobile bought in a Shanghai market, a People's Processor, a phone for the everyman, or a local operator that just happens to be seen as a terrorist organization, the boundaries around who happens to be a "legit" innovator and who is black market is blurring. Bottom-up innovation doesn't just come in an official wrapper, and increasingly, we will see consumers in parts of the world where price/performance is measured differently choose high technology from a broader bazaar of providers, as they do for low technology today. Today's No Name Inc. may be tomorrow's Notion Ink. 

 

 

Filed under  //   Android   counterfeits   design   grey markets   innovation   mobile   open source   stats  
Posted by Scott Smith 

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January 6, 2010

Leaner, Meaner, Cleaner Futures

Scott has written extensively on the shift towards "small" taking place referencing elements as diverse as the influence of the emerging BoPNet as well as incremental improvements. Now, McKinsey has released their research on the shift in consumer preferences in the packaged goods industry which ends with the following paragraph supporting this trend.

There’s evidence that the shift of consumers away from more expensive products is a widespread trend. In the consumer electronics industry, for example, McKinsey research found that 60 percent of consumers were more interested in a core set of product features at a reasonable price than in the bells and whistles of the latest and greatest technology at a higher price.3 Similarly, in the building-products industry, there is a trend away from premium-priced design features and toward simpler, more basic designs. Understanding this challenging shift in consumer behavior is necessary for companies to compete successfully.4 It represents an opportunity for those that respond quickly and effectively to differentiate themselves from their peers.

Filed under  //   design   innovation   McKinsey   small  
Posted by Niti Bhan 

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January 1, 2010

Questioning the Global Mobile Apparatgeist

The Economist recently put forth an argument strongly reminiscent of Theodore Levitt's 1983 HBR classic "The globalization of markets" (PDF) where he first framed the concept that global consumer preferences were converging, thus companies could develop, launch and market the same product across the globe - “Different cultural preferences, national tastes and standards, and business institutions are vestiges of the past." We know where that argument went however, so lets take a closer look at the venerable Economist's thesis. A few key snippets:

A few years ago such questions provoked academic controversy. Not everybody agrees with Ms Ito’s argument that techno logy is always socially constructed. James Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers University in New Jersey, argues that there is an Apparatgeist (German for “spirit of the machine”). For personal communication technologies, he argues, people react in pretty much the same way, a few national variations notwithstanding. “Regardless of culture,” he suggests, “when people interact with personal communication technologies, they tend to standardise infrastructure and gravitate towards consistent tastes and universal features.”


and even more reminiscent of Levitt's words:

In the long run most national differences will disappear, predicts Scott Campbell of the University of Michigan, author of several papers on mobile-phone usage. But he expects some persistence of variations that go back to economics. In poorer countries subscribers will handle their mobile phones differently simply because they lack money. Nearly all airtime in Africa is pre-paid. Practices such as “beeping” are likely to continue for quite a while: when callers lack credit, they hang up after just one ring, a signal that they want to be called back.

Curiosity made me seek out Campbell's studies, one of which (PDF) looked at cross cultural usage patterns - from its abstract, we learn these cultures are "A sample of participants from the U.S. Mainland, Hawaii, Japan, Taiwan, and Sweden was surveyed for social acceptability assessments of talking on a mobile phone in each of these locations." Quite.

One fears The Economist has been a tad slapdash in constructing their thesis of an emerging global mobile Apparatgeist for their own data chart above shows that we are now close to 4 and half billion mobile phone users in the world. Even a cursory glance at the numbers would inform us that not more than the first billion and a half were members of such well off and well connected nations such as those studied above or the OECD.

Can the converging practices and habits of a quarter of the total user base influence the rest strongly enough to give rise to such a singular global mobile culture or will the other 75% of mobile phone users continue on with their workarounds and innovations, overlooked and unnoticed by the "world" until their influence bursts forth as a "surprise"? Or will the global media's apparatchiks finally unblinker their vision to consider the mobile majority and its own growing influence? These differences posed by the mobile majority  are those that stand poised to influence global convergence in their own particular way (as has been discussed in previous posts on the BoPNet and the DevNet).

Certainly, it can be said that Levitt's prediction of a global marketplace ruled by standardized products sold at low prices (1) has come true for the global mobile phone market, but it is one thing to build standard hardware for the world and entirely another to minimize the immense challenges posed by economics, not to mention culture and language, literacy and contextual knowledge as The Economist does:

Only a few countries, mainly in Africa and Asia, still need special cultural attention when designing a phone (which is why some models in India double as torches).

That's right, only a few countries that happen to constitute a market of  2 or 3 billion people btw, a fact that neither manufacturers nor service providers overlook as they consider how best to serve these markets.

It is this article's implication that only the converging social or cultural behaviour of the first world masses constitute any kind of global trend - future or otherwise - that diminishes the importance of the wireless platform, its impact and influence on the daily lives, the wellbeing and the income of the rest. It also underlines the blinkered perspective of the (not even mainstream anymore really) media and analysis that tends to skew perception of the global mobile market and its attendant potential, challenges and opportunities for innovation.

Filed under  //   culture   design   globalization   innovation   markets   mobile  
Posted by Niti Bhan 

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November 9, 2009

Mobile Money Practices

Designing Services for Financial Inclusion

Jan Chipchase posted a great paper and slide deck today summarizing top-level themes in mobile money practices from Nokia's research around the world, and elaborated on some design implications of his teams' findings. 

The compelling Venn diagram from the outset is this: in 2009, there are 3.5 billion people unbanked worldwide, and 4+ billion mobile phones in people's hands on the planet (not Jan's figure, but the ITU). The crossover point is some 1.7 billion unbanked people with mobile phones by 2012. That's a huge opportunity, moreso because of what tapping a percentage of that group might unleash in terms of economic benefit than the profit to be had from enabling it.

Read on and find out more.

Filed under  //   banking   BOP   design   innovation   mobile   money   Nokia   practices   research  
Posted by Scott Smith 

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October 15, 2009

Technology as Multiplier

Recently I was in a workshop tantalizingly entitled "Think Wrong" at A Better World by Design 09, a three-day conference of designers, students, engineers, and others focused on using design thinking for social impact. Since I often run ideation workshops, it was fun to be on the receiving end for a change, free to think instead of facilitate. As part of the workshop, groups were charged with coming up with ideas for using 100 volunteers for good, in whatever way we could brainstorm in an hour. Given a "starter" word to spark some lateral thinking ("windowsill" in our case), a group of about eight of us set about rapidly making leaps and connections to arrive at some concepts.  

Reflecting on the exercise now over a week later, one element in our discussion that I found interesting was the extent to which we wanted to apply technology as a force multiplier—an amplifier—to increase the potential impact of our concept, ultimately titled "100x100" for that very reason. We looked at using social capital within social networks to get us from 100 to 100 million acts of good quickly, or using media to project recorded moments of kindness across cityscapes. We even looked at data visualization as a way to move people to join the action. 

This struck me on two levels: 1) as a group of relatively young, digitally adept creatives, our thoughts immediately traveled to technology as a necessary component, albeit with human catalysts, and 2) virality was the assumed "fuel" with which our solutions would travel. Not all groups in the workshop used some form of technological delivery, but most did. And we didn't really even think about it. Were the solutions unnecessarily complex as a result? Not all—in most cases it was a tactical, if implicit, decision to get from A to B. 

What this reiterates to me is, from cognitive and behavioral points of view, how careful we have to be not to use a sledgehammer when a screwdriver or even a toothpick might do. As we face increasingly low-tech problems we need to take a step back and calibrate the use of technology with other, less complex toolsets. Appropriate technology must be the first consideration—to phrase the Hippocratic oath, "first, create no complexity". 

Filed under  //   brainstorming   bxd09   complexity   design   technology  
Posted by Scott Smith 

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