Bridging local innovation and global scale
Manufacturing scale from household innovations
Welcome to the fourth issue of the Evolving Impact newsletter, a weekly(ish) exploration of technology, culture, and complexity in global development and humanitarian aid.
Dear reader,
There has been much said in recent years about the need to involve affected communities in innovation efforts, and make funding and support for innovation more responsive to community needs and priorities.1 This was a big focus of my work at Elrha, where I helped establish the Community-Led Innovation Partnership, alongside the Start Network and the Asia Disaster Reduction and Response Network (ADDRN).
At the same time as the push to support ‘bottom up’ innovation, there is also a donor-led imperative to scale successful interventions to multiple contexts so as to maximise impact and ensure the cost-effectiveness of investments.2 How can these two seemingly opposing demands be reconciled? How can we support grassroots innovation and context-specific solutions, while at the same time supporting scale with multiple actors in multiple contexts around the world?
A December 2019 episode of the Freakonomics Radio podcast discusses the concept of ‘household innovation’, drawing from a working paper by Daniel Sichel and Eric von Hippel. At the beginning of the podcast von Hippel explains how the mountain bike came to market:3
People start riding bikes down mountains, and then they modify the bikes so that they can ride down mountains more easily. They discover, “Oh, I have to have stronger brakes. I have to have this, I have to have that.” And the manufacturers, meanwhile, are saying, “Well, that’s stupid. You shouldn’t be doing that. Your warranty is void.” But then as a lot of people begin to do it, they say, “Aha! Not only is there a proven innovation, but there’s a signal of general demand.” And that’s the point at which you begin to define what a mountain bike should look like.
Von Hippel estimates that household innovation accounts for about 30% of all private sector R&D activity. In instances where companies source ideas from household innovation, rather than their own R&D activity, they add value in the process of taking those innovations to market. He continues:4
Producers also do things. They just do different things. So the user is developing what he or she needs, generating new functionality, and generating a new market. What the producers then do is they produce things that everybody will want. They improve products. So what you have is user hacks, and then the companies follow. But what the companies do is make it much more reliable, more easily operable, manufacturable.
The development of the Every Second Matters for Mother and Child Uterine Balloon Tamponade (ESM-UBT), funded by Elrha in 2013, followed a similar trajectory. The ESM-UBT is a low-cost device consisting of a condom tied to a catheter (a thin, sterile tube) and inflated with clean water to stem severe bleeding following childbirth — also known as post-partum haemorrhage.
In 2009 Dr Thomas Burke, Chief of the Division of Global Health and Human Rights at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), was approached by the government of South Sudan and a donor fund to develop a community-based package to address maternal, newborn and child emergencies. According to Dr Burke:5
We looked around the world for inspiration and found examples of creative obstetrican-gynaecologists in Bangladesh and Uganda who were making their own uterine balloon tamponades with gloves or condoms in place of the Bakri balloons. This prompted us to trial different examples, and we developed the ESM-UBT package from there, including a kit costing less than US$5, along with a training programme, wall charts, checklists and facility manuals.
The ESM-UBT story bears a striking resemblance to the mountain bike story. In both instances the people involved observed multiple instances of local or household innovators improvising with hacked together products that served their particular purpose. From observing these multiple cases they recognised the utility of the solutions that were being developed and saw a clear signal of need or demand. The next step was to learn from these instances and refine the design of the product, before working out how to make it more widely available.
What do these examples of ‘innovators’ and ‘manufactures’ mean for how the development and humanitarian sector might support local innovation, while responding to the imperative of scale? I think they point to a need to think more carefully about the different roles required to support innovation, and the degree to which different actors are well-placed to perform different roles.
The dominant design-centric view of the innovation process places the primary responsibility to scale on the innovator, who is the central actor at each stage of the journey. It is generally acknowledged that successes from this perspective are few and far between; scaling remains a much-discussed challenge in the development and humanitarian sector 50 years after the World Bank first started talking about it.6
While there are efforts to advocate for a better ‘enabling environment’ for scale, these often serve to reinforce the idea that others are enabling the path to scale for the innovator. There is less recognition that scaling is a deeply collective endeavour, and a collective responsibility. It is often the case that innovators are most concerned with solving the problem that’s in front of them; they do not necessarily have the vantage point, capabilities, or primary motivation to scale the solution.
The bike modifiers wanted to ride down mountains; they had neither the capacity nor the inclination to manufacture mountain bikes and market them to a mass audience. The pioneering obstetrican-gynaecologists in Bangladesh and Uganda were focused on saving lives in their communities, and may well prefer to continue doing that while doing what they can to help others who are better placed to develop a standardised package and facilitate wider uptake.
The ‘manufacturer’ has a different perspective and a different set of skills: searching, refining, codifying, positioning, and marketing a solution to a new audience. The manufacturer looks for local solutions that signal wider possible applications, like the bike modifications or the uterine balloon tamponade. They take these instances, analyse their component parts, and synthesise that learning into a common approach that can be made available to a much larger market, perhaps with additional structured tailoring for different target groups.
Funding calls might not be the best way to find these opportunities. For starters, a typical funding call fosters competition rather than collaboration, emphasising distinction rather than complementarity. Second, they tend to rely on a ‘single shot’ approach, when a multi-step ‘snowballing’ approach is preferable.7 Third, funding calls rely on ‘innovators’ to be actively searching for such funding, when this might not match their motivations. Lastly, they have to be willing and able to jump through the hoops of funding applications and due diligence.
A better approach is likely to emphasise active scouting and curation of solutions, applying research-oriented methods such as positive deviance or the lead user method (the latter also being derived from von Hippel’s work). In 2017 Elrha funded an IFRC project that compared the costs and benefits of running a competitive funding call and implementing the lead user method. The experiment found the lead user method to be more suitable for uncovering local innovations:8
Solutions surfaced via the lead user method scored better on the overall quality index, also in terms of the single dimensions use value, feasibility, degree of elaboration, and social impact…Our findings also indicated that solutions based on this indigenous or grassroots knowledge are not proactively submitted to innovation contests, but have to be identified by actively searching for and going into affected communities.
Once innovations have been identified that share similar and complementary characteristics, and respond to common problems, a programme of support needs to be put in place. To balance competing motivations and priorities, such a facility might provide additional community-level support while also performing the ‘extractive’ work of mapping, analysing, evaluating, codifying, and positioning the innovations for wider uptake.
But that’s not where it ends. As the market for mountain bikes has grown, many new variations on the standard design have been introduced, e.g., suspension, durable wheels, powerful breaks. Similarly, as the ESM-UBT package has reached new audiences, further changes have been made for language or learning preferences. The approach continues to evolve as it is challenged by different contexts, resulting in ongoing variation and development. All this is benefited by continued stewarding and feedback between ‘manufacturer’ and ‘innovators.’
Aside from some light editing, I wrote 90% of the above copy in 2019, but I didn’t find a place to publish it, so it remained in an text document until I happened across it again earlier this week. If you read last week’s issue, and it all sounds familiar, it will be no surprise that I think there are some parallels between this story and the one I told about Save the Children’s Common Approaches — which is what prompted me to dust it off and share it now.
My original motivation in writing the piece was to propose the role of ‘manufacturer’ in supporting innovation, at a time when it seemed like competitive funding calls and a focus on individual projects was dominant. I imagined a team with strong intelligence gathering, research, and communications and marketing capabilities. I submitted it to Stanford Social Innovation Review to see if it might be suitable and got a polite response along the lines of, “Yes, very good, but you need to include examples of how the idea has been put into practice.” At the time, I wasn’t really familiar with any.
A few years on and more examples come to mind. Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) was a big oversight; they’ve been around since 2002 and arguably match the model closely with their mission to discover and advance innovations through research and knowledge translation. IPA has used multiple techniques to identify innovations, including evidence reviews and nominations processes, and more recently has increased its focus on uptake among decision makers.910
Another favourite example is UNDP’s Accelerator Labs, which seek to “tap into local innovations to create actionable insights.”11 The Accelerator Labs have put similar ideas into practice by recruiting a ‘Head of Exploration’, a ‘Head of Solution Mapping’ and a ‘Head of Experimentation’ in each country team. Collectively, the three roles use an array of approaches to find, map, test, and amplify under-the-radar solutions.12
UNDP Accelerator Labs have also collaborated extensively with the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, an initiative with highly-relevant capabilities for this kind of work. Together, they have identified 15 methods that use technology to “mobilize, make sense of, or augment the observations, insights and ideas of large numbers of people,” such as citizen science, crowd mapping, and peer-to-peer exchange.13
If you know of any other initiatives that work to find, map, and synthesise evidence and learning from grassroots innovations, please leave a comment!
I’m away next week but I’ll be back again the week after.
Thanks for reading.
What else?
🌐 I discussed Save the Children’s Common Approaches in depth last week. If you’re interested to learn more, download the catalogue where you’ll find in-depth descriptions of each approach, including the problem that each approach addresses and its core components.
🏙️ What happened to ‘useless’ beauty in architectural design? Ornaments on buildings matter because they speak to local culture and craftsmanship; they give buildings meaning and improve quality of life. This quick read from the Culture Critic offers some broader lessons for navigating the balance between context specificity and scale.
🤝 The H2H Network brings together 60 independent humanitarian service providers who are leading efforts to improve and transform global humanitarian response. Their latest annual report provides some nice insights on various projects and collaborations, and points towards increased focus on anticipatory action as part of its efforts to support innovation in the sector.
🧠 A new paper by Geoff Mulgan for Demos Helsinki makes the case that generative shared intelligence (GSI) should be the defining goal for all governments (and arguably all big public bureaucracies), proposing 12 ways in which combinations of different kinds of intelligence can contribute to better outcomes, while avoiding techno-solutionism.
And finally: This newsletter is pretty niche. If you know anyone else interested in digging beneath the jargon and buzzwords to explore the nature of innovation and what it means for development and humanitarian impact, please share it with them.
I write as way to reflect, learn, and make sense of things, so everything is typed by hand without any inputs from AI. I sometimes use ChatGPT and Perplexity for brainstorming, research, and relating concepts, but all sources are cross-checked, reviewed, and referenced.
Bruder, M. and Baar, T. (2024) ‘Innovation in humanitarian assistance—a systematic literature review’, Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 9(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-023-00144-3.
Cooley, L., Kohl, R. and Ved, R.R. (2016) Scaling Up—From Vision to Large-Scale Change: A Management Framework for Practitioners (Third Edition). Arlington, VA: Management Systems International (MSI). Available at: https://www.msiworldwide.com/sites/default/files/additional-resources/2018-11/ScalingUp_3rdEdition.pdf.
Dubner, S. (2019) ‘Honey, I Grew the Economy’. (Freakonomics Radio). Available at: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/honey-i-grew-the-economy/.
Dubner, S. (2019) ‘Honey, I Grew the Economy’. (Freakonomics Radio). Available at: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/honey-i-grew-the-economy/.
McClelland, I. (2017) ‘Condoms can significantly reduce maternal mortality. But not in the way you might think’, Elrha, 2 October. Available at: https://medium.com/elrha/condoms-can-significantly-reduce-maternal-mortality-but-not-in-the-way-you-might-think-f808853fd906.
Hartmann, A. and Linn, J.F. (2008) Scaling Up: A Framework and Lessons for Development Effectiveness from Literature and Practice. Working Paper 5. Washington, D.C: Wolfenson Center for Development at Brookings. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/research/scaling-up-a-framework-and-lessons-for-development-effectiveness-from-literature-and-practice/.
Hill, D. (2022) Designing Missions: A practice guide by Vinnova. Stockholm: Vinnova. Available at: https://www.vinnova.se/en/publikationer/mission-oriented-innovation---a-handbook-from-vinnova/.
Goeldner, M., Kruse, D.J. and Herstatt, C. (2017) ‘Lead User Method vs. Innovation Contest An Empirical Comparison of Two Open Innovation Methodologies for Identifying Social Innovation for Flood Resilience in Indonesia’, SSRN Electronic Journal [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3070877.
IPA (no date) Path-to-Scale Research Program: Identifying Evidence-Based Approaches. New York: Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Available at: https://poverty-action.org/path-to-scale-research.
IPA (no date) Theory of Action. New York Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Available at: https://poverty-action.org/theory-action
UNDP Accelerator Labs (no date) ‘What we do’. Available at: https://www.undp.org/acceleratorlabs
For a description of what each role involves, see these three blogs: Paredes Chaux, S. (2020) ‘What we talk about when we talk about “Exploration”’, UNDP Accelerator Labs, 12 February. Available at: https://acclabs.medium.com/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-exploration-ee38fcd8109c; Gul, E. (2020) ‘What we talk about when we talk about “Experimentation”’, UNDP Accelerator Labs, 19 March. Available at: https://acclabs.medium.com/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-experimentation-d3a459c121da; and Saeed, B. (2020) ‘What we talk about when we talk about “Solutions Mapping”’, UNDP Accelerator Labs, 23 June. Available at: https://acclabs.medium.com/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-solutions-mapping-62efd531498(Accessed: 13 August 2024).
Peach, K. et al. (2021) Collective Intelligence for Sustainable Development: Getting Smarter Together. London: Nesta/UNDP. Available at: https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/collective-intelligence-sustainable-development-getting-smarter-together/.