The Truth About Disruptive Development in the Digital Village
After a quick Twitter interaction, I find myself having agreed to write this caveat to Ken Banks’ recently published article The Truth About Disruptive Development published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. So I’ll start by taking a step back to ask myself what aspects of his proposed points make me hesitate with a second […]
Reframing Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) as a human centered design challenge
The tangible manifestation of the concept of turning government’s calls to action for public private partnerships in development was crafted by Jeroen Meijer of JAM Visualdenken and expertise on sustainable agricultural value chains provided by Bart Doorneweert of LEI, Wageningen. The design challenges, as we called them, reframed the problem statement in the form a […]
Interim project report: User centered Agricultural value chain development
My colleague and project leader for the current work in The Netherlands, Bart Doorneweert has just published an excellent analysis of our workshop on user centered design for a multi stakeholder group invited by the Ministries of Economic Affairs and Foreign Affairs. Here’s a snippet: Insights on the multi-stakeholder working processWhen the break-out groups re-convened […]
Market creation is built on a foundation of communications
Strategic conversations is a concept I learnt from Dina Mehta, over the phone, recently and I just recognized a clear cut case of it. The World Bank has just launched a platform for conversations to happen around the wicked problems of the day. Re-aligning the flow between intent and action is much easier with a […]
User driven innovation planning and strategy in development
It was with feeling of satisfaction that I read Eric Smallberg’s recent post titled “Thankfully, ICT4D is Now About Strategy and Implementations, Not Technovelty” where brings up the lessons from failure and the shift in emphasis of technology based development projects and social enterprises. He says: Richard Heeks wrote about the early history of these […]
“Some NGO gave us a mosquito net”
Kitui, Eastern Province, Kenya July 2012 Serem, Western Kenya, June 2012 This post was written by niti bhan and rss originates from www.nitibhan.com
The customer is the king; the beneficiary will remain a pauper
We weren’t beholden to our customers until we starting thinking like a business. We didn’t hold ourselves accountable until we started treating our ‘beneficiaries’ as customers. No investor took us seriously until we dropped the ‘social enterprise’ label. ~ Ben Lyon, Founder, KopoKopo, Nairobi, Kenya When I wrote “Why so much ‘BoP’ marketing fails […]
How do you compete in a market where charity distorts pricing?
Strategy guru Michael Porter’s 5 forces framework is quite well known to anyone attempting to assess or analyze the landscape of an operating environment for an industry or organization. Increasingly, since I’ve begun working out of Sub Sahara I’ve been sensing the challenge of a 6th force – one that is overlooked when consumer markets […]
