Welcoming to USAID: White House Presidential Innovation Fellows

September 6, 2012 · 0 comments

Source: USAID Impact Blog, Aug 24, 2012.

Welcoming to USAID: White House Presidential Innovation Fellows

This Thursday, the White House launched The Presidential Innovation Fellows Program (PIF), which pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate on solutions that aim to deliver significant results in six months.   USAID is proud to be part of two pillars of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program: the 20% Initiative, and the Open Data Initiative. 

The Mobile Solutions Division at USAID is excited to welcome fellow Karl Mehta for the 20% Initiative.  A Silicon Valley based entrepreneur, engineer and inventor, he has built and sold three businesses, and has worked in the intersection of media, technology and payments for years.

The 20% Initiative will create a system that supports foreign policy, development assistance, government operations or commercial activities to seamlessly move from making cash payments to electronic payments, including mobile money. The Initiative aims build greater transparency and significantly reduce fraud, and to provide cost savings for both institutions and end beneficiaries of programs through a 20% transition from cash to electronic payments by 2016. USAID is committed to supporting the integration of electronic and mobile payments in our programs and operations and starting within USAID the goal is to include as many U.S. government agencies operating overseas as possible.

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Water For People – Everyone Forever

August 30, 2012 · 0 comments

Source: Circle of Blue, Aug 22, 2012

Water For People Strives To Reach Everyone Forever– Ned Breslin

Ned Breslin.

The global water crisis is immense. The standard approach to solve this crisis is to build water projects all over the world. Water For People did this, and we learned that isolated projects struggle to be sustainable and fail to provide a global solution.

We developed the EVERYONE FOREVER program, which is now concentrating on 30 districts in 10 countries. Representing our work in Southern Asia is India. And on the other side of the world, we are working in Honduras. Further south, Water for People is in Bolivia. And, in Central Africa we are tackling the water problem in Rwanda. But in all of the countries we work in, we are striving to accomplish a few key goals.

The first big goal is to make sure that every family, every school, and every clinic has access to improved water. We can no longer be satisfied with only reaching the most vocal, most accessible communities. Instead, Water For People is pushing to help EVERYONE, including the poorer, harder to reach areas in each district. An important part of the EVERYONE FOREVER program is co-financing, which means that Water For People isn’t solely responsible for funding. In fact, the local communities and district governments provide a huge percentage of the funds. Local financial contributions create a necessary commitment to success that allows for water to flow, for technical problems that emerge to be addressed, and for water systems to grow with the community, as it changes over time.

Another important goal within EVERYONE FOREVER has to do with ensuring that these water and sanitation programs are sustainable. Any infrastructure with moving parts is eventually going to break. Water For People trains local partners to be able to respond to these problems and fix them, and, in doing so, we enable the community members that we help to keep water flowing FOREVER. Beyond that, Water For People continues to monitor its programs for 10 years after they have been implemented. This is completely unique in the water and sanitation (WASH) sector. This combination of monitoring and partnership ensures that an initial investment in a community like El Limon, Guatemala, will eventually lead to complete aid independence. Now that’s something worth celebrating! In other words, the people in these districts will never need the help of another international water NGO again. Only then can our work in any district truly be considered a success. But, Water For People doesn’t stop there.

We are striving towards a greater goal and trying to look at the bigger picture. In the end, we want our work and our programs to be replicable. The goal is that success in the 30 districts will spill over in these four countries until the principles of EVERYONE FOREVER are adopted nationally.

If you would like to be a part of the EVERYONE FOREVER success story, the learn more about Water For People, donate, or sign the EVERYONE FOREVER commitment at www.waterforpeople.org.

Turning Customer Intelligence Into Innovation

August 23, 2012 · 0 comments

Source: Scott Anthony, Bloomberg – Aug 20, 2012

Turning Customer Intelligence Into Innovation

It’s a paradox of the information age. The glut of information that bombards us daily too frequently obscures true insight. Intelligence should drive better innovation, but unless it is strategically collected and used, it functions like a summer beach novel — an engaging distraction.

Thoughtful companies intertwine customer intelligence throughout the three phases that characterize most successful innovations. Innovation starts with discovery — where an innovator pinpoints an important problem to solve. Ground-level intelligence is critical to this part of the process.

Scott Anthony

While companies are increasingly using detailed analytics to fine-tune pricing, packaging, and product performance, analytics have their limits when it comes to finding the next big idea. After all, data only exists about the past — discovering untapped opportunities typically requires a heavy dose of primary research to tease out what the customer needs but cannot easily articulate. Consumers don’t do a good jobreporting what they currently want or do, let along what they might want or will do in the future.

Procter & Gamble is famous for its deep commitment to these kinds of anthropological approaches. For example, in the early 2000s, P&G investigated the cleaning habits of Indian consumers who washed garments by hand. At first glance that’s a counterintuitive place to look for new growth, because those consumers are unlikely to buy P&G detergents formulated for washing machines. But since hand washers constitute 80% of the home-based washing market in India, it was too big a market to ignore. P&G observed that many consumers were in fact hand washing garments using machine-oriented detergents to take advantage of their superior cleaning benefits. However, the chemical formulations weren’t intended for hand washing and could cause abrasions or burns.

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Water.org – We Need ‘New Ways of Thinking’ About Water Crisis

August 14, 2012 · 0 comments

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

Aug 14, 2012 – Gates Foundation Re-invent the Toilet Challenge Awards

August 9, 2012 · 0 comments

On August 14, Bill Gates will present the “Re-invent the Toilet Challenge” awards. Last year, the Gates Foundation issued this challenge to create a toilet without piped-in water, a sewer connection, or outside electricity—all for less than 5 cents per user a day. 

Now, just a year later, eight finalists from around the world will be showcasing their ideas through working prototypes and full scale models at the “Reinvent the Toilet Fair” hosted at the foundation. The fair aims to inspire collaboration around a shared mission of delivering a reinvented toilet for the 2.5 billion people worldwide that who don’t have access to safe and affordable sanitation.

Finalists include innovations such as a solar-powered toilet that generates cooking gas, a toilet that turns human waste into biological charcoal, and a toilet that turns waste into electricity.

In addition, nearly thirty Grand Challenges Explorations and other Water, Sanitation and Hygiene program grantees aligned with reinventing the toilet will display components of toilet prototypes, full-scale models, designs, and other proofs of concept. These exhibitors are showcasing a range of work, including latrine emptying solutions, user-centered designs for public toilet facilities, and insect-based latrines that decompose feces faster.

We will be sending a press release announcing the winner, along with photos and videos of the prototypes on August 14. We will also be blogging about the event on ImpatientOptimists.org. Tweets will use #innovation, #sanitation, and #toilet.

For more information, visit:

Microfinance for Water and Sanitation: An Example of Client-Focused Innovation

August 9, 2012 · 0 comments

Source: CGAP Microfinance Blog

Microfinance for Water and Sanitation: An Example of Client-Focused Innovation

by April Rinne and John Moyer, May 28, 2012

Microfinance was conceived in the name of community service. In fact, one could argue that the industry’s DNA inherently aligns it with the needs of local communities. This is one of the industry’s core strengths. As Michael Porter and other insightful business thinkers have emphasized, excessive focus on short-term financial performance while ignoring customer and community well-being distorts decision making, inhibits innovation and ultimately limits financial success. Those companies that create “Shared Value” by aligning their products and services with the needs of their clients and local communities will innovate and grow over the long-run. Yet as events of recent years demonstrate, precisely because of its sustainable success microfinance was not exempt from the nearsighted tendency to prioritize short-term financial results. Fortunately, with current global efforts such as the Smart Campaign there is a conscious and concerted effort across the industry to refocus on the needs of our clients and the health of our communities.

In countless communities across the globe, access to clean water and sanitation still remains an unmet need. Despite substantial efforts over the last 20 years, close to one billion people still lack access to safe water. More than 2.6 billion people – more than one in every three people alive – don’t have adequate sanitation. To put that in stark perspective, more people in the world have a mobile phone than a toilet. Water collection and health problems related to poor  sanitation impose significant time and productivity costs at the individual, household, community and national levels.

It’s hard to be productive when you spend your day sick, scavenging or waiting long hours for water. Moreover, when macro trends such as urbanization and climate change are factored in, water- and sanitation-related challenges are further magnified. Yet they must be tackled, if not out of a simple moral obligation, then to ensure our collective well-being in an increasingly globalized world.

Traditional approaches to financing water and sanitation needs in the developing world – which typically have consisted of “waiting to win the grant lottery,” drilling ever-more wells, and lack of ongoing funding for maintenance and local skills training – are coming up short. Often the costs of a water or sanitation connection (averaging $150 in India, or $250 in Kenya) are prohibitive for a poor family, yet if they had such connection, the family’s entire life, livelihood and well-being would materially change overnight.

Moreover, they could realize significant long-term cost savings that result from having reliable access to a known source of water and improved hygiene.

Microfinance can help address this crisis by tapping into our creative and collaborative resources to revolutionize how the global water and sanitation crisis is understood.

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Grant to commercialize innovative hand-washing solution in Southeast Asia

July 31, 2012 · 0 comments

Source: WaterSHED, July 27, 2012

USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures awards WaterSHED $100K WASH for Life grant to commercialize innovative hand-washing solution in Southeast Asia

The U.S. Agency for International Development’s Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) awarded WaterSHED, an NGO based in Cambodia, a $100,000 Stage 1 grant to seed the commercial introduction of an innovative hand-washing solution in Vietnam. The commercial launch and scale-up of WaterSHED’s hand-washing product will be a pioneering step towards a solution to the global, public health challenge of consistent hand-washing.

Handwashing Device Commercialization: HappyTap

“USAID is proud to provide WaterSHED with the early stage support it needs to launch its innovative, life-saving device on the market, and help tackle the 900,000 deaths in Vietnam each year that can be associated with improper hand-washing practices,” said Dr. Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Counselor to the Administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In Vietnam, the economic costs of poor hygiene are estimated at US$262 million per year. In rural Vietnam, merely 6.1 percent of people wash hands with soap before eating and comparably few people wash hands with soap at critical times such as after toilet use and before food preparation. Effective hand-washing in Vietnam would significantly reduce the transmission of communicable diseases, the ever-growing threat from pandemic flus and the economic, and the health burdens imposed by diarrheal disease and respiratory infections – two of the top three causes of child mortality in the Lower Mekong Region.

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Innovate Or Become Irrelevant: 4 Ways to Use Social Enterprising

July 25, 2012 · 0 comments

Source – Christine Comaford, Forbes, July 24, 2012

Innovate Or Become Irrelevant: 4 Ways to Use Social Enterprising to Drive Innovation 

Christine Comaford

“Social enterprising and engineering give us the ability to innovate using many minds instantly, as opposed to using a few highly versed experts with unavoidable biases tied to the old way of doing business.

With social enterprising, one can get an instant pulse on the direction of the wave as opposed to feeling the wave through product development and marketing.

Better yet, I submit that social enterprising will open the door to other areas of innovation and business development such as: cloud computing applied to pattern recognition, machine learning and computer vision, data parsing for quick decision making, worldwide warning system for earthquake monitoring and prediction etc…”

–Dr. Pierre-Richard Cornely

Dr. Cornely posted this comment on my previous blog about the importance of building a social enterprise.

I agree 100%.

Every week CEOs contact me for techniques to increase their rate and quality of innovation, to expedite product and service development, to streamline customer input in the process of creation. How do we do this? Read on.

1.      Create a Culture of Innovation

The #1 problem we see in cultures of low innovation is the lack of rewards and consequences in the areas where they need to be—in fostering new ideas and risk taking. Beyond the top level of management, many team members experience very little support of their ideas. As they say in Hollywood “It isn’t a good idea until the right person has it.” Would your team members report that their ideas are being shot down before due consideration? If so, you’ll quickly find that new ideas are “somebody else’s responsibility.”

Next check your company’s level of conflict avoidance. When we don’t have healthy debate ideas will be stalled and innovation will suffer. And if ideas do get a fair hearing, ensure they also get adequate due diligence. When innovations are rushed to market for innovation’s sake (or a manager’s bonus) low customer interest, costly production and/or warranty issues will appear. Healthy conflict, structured brainstorming forums where “stupid” ideas are OK, external focus and “what if” thinking is essential in a culture of innovation.

Last, make sure you have a solid connection between R&D, sales and customers.  A company that is focused on and in constant touch with its customers will naturally create highly compelling products. Focus, priority, structure, leadership, rewards, and dedicated time are key to fostering a culture of innovation. See #4 below to more deeply root innovation in your culture.

2.      Create an Innovation Advisory Board

This is a structured group of clients and prospective clients who’ll be a sounding board for your innovations. Your Innovation Advisory Board (IAB) members are ideally a cross-section of 8-10 decision-making executives who’ll share their needs with you in order to help you create the products they want.  Pick 30% current clients, 30% prospective clients in current markets, and 40% prospective clients in markets you’d like to one day enter—and with the products they’ll help you design. Have a formal structure (30 min interview via phone or in person) to solicit input on an IAB member’s needs and future strategy that you could support.  If they are a current client be sure to ask them what they would like to change in your current products—innovation can also be improvement.

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Innovations in cooking fuels and soap

July 6, 2012 · 0 comments

Source: PR Web, July 6, 2012

Design Impact Receives Accolades for Innovation in Social Design from International Design Society

The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) named two of Design Impact’s projects as finalists in the 2012 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) competition.

Design Impact announced today that two of their social design projects were named as finalists in the Social Design Category of IDSA’s 2012 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) competition.

The Erikoodu (“burning nest”) Smokeless Charcoal Briquette Cooking System offers a clean-burning, affordable cooking fuel for low-income families in India. The system is comprised of a mixer, press and drying rack which is used to transform scraps of unusable charcoal into a briquette. Pressed from sustainably-produced charcoal, the briquette does not release smoke during cooking, which reduces indoor air pollution. The manufacture of the system generates a new source of income and raises the standard of living for women and the Tamil Nadu, India, community.

Paruva Kaalam Fair Trade Soap is a handmade soap produced by women in Tamil Nadu, India. It is made of glycerin, a natural co-product of the local small-scale biofuel refining process. The design team shared business and branding expertise to help design and internationally market the handmade soap, while also embedding skills into the local community. The enterprise offers a community-driven income opportunity for local women while utilizing existing resources.

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Your Cell Phone: The Health Lab

June 29, 2012 · 0 comments

Source: #innov8aid | Development Innovators Blog, June 27, 2012

You already use your cell phone to check the weather, play games, even act as a flashlight, alarm clock and stopwatch. Now a new attachment will turn your phone into a laboratory, too.

A research team in California has developed a phone attachment that can test blood or water samples – advanced microanalysis previously only possible with expensive, bulky hospital equipment. Samples could be inserted like memory sticks into the mechanical attachment, which reads the slides and provides a diagnosis in plain English – no advanced biology classes needed.

Photo by: Ozcan Research Group

Funding came from U.S. government sources like the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, which saw the potential for improving battlefield care, telemedicine and public health monitoring in big cities. But the product’s ability to function in low-resource settings makes it applicable to developing countries as well.

The technology acts like a microscope and diagnostic tool all at once, bringing the hospital to the field. It uses an algorithm that would allow a front line health worker to quickly test someone’s blood for malaria parasites, or to get a read on how well a patient’s HIV is being controlled with medication. People could also manage their health conditions by using the easy-to-use interface themselves to send test results to a clinic they otherwise couldn’t get to.

The data from these tools can be coded for location and time and copied to a central server, providing an accurate and real-time picture of a disease outbreak or a water condition for emergency responders or policymakers.

The attachment brings an army of technologies together, basically using all the cool things a cell phone can do – like connect wirelessly and do digital imaging – and putting them to work together in a new way. Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, who leads the California research team behind the attachment, said he got the idea while thinking about how he would re-do the centuries-old technology of microscopes if he started from scratch with today’s digital and electronic building blocks.

The attachment only adds 40-50 grams, the weight of around ten U.S. nickels. It can use the phone’s battery, or an added AAA.

Los Angeles-based company Holomic is aiming to commercialize the attachment within the year, and cost information on the rapid diagnostic test reader should be available by mid-summer.

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