DESIGN4SOCIALBUSINESS

design for social business conference - milano - oct 2010

FIgure 1: Social challenges, unknowns (sources of uncertainty, risk and ambiguity), and questions to answer. Inspired in the areas of design proposed for the Create for Chile challenges to solve the social problems after the Chilean Earthquake of February 2010.

Positive+Design for Social Business challenges, unknowns and questions

By Carlos A. Osorio, PhD (carlos.osorio@uai.cl), professor of innovation Universidad Adolfo Ibanez (CHILE), fellow at the Center for Social Innovation of A Roof for my Country, and founder of Designing Better Futures

I thank Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, from Stanfords D.School and Lime Design Associates, who reviewed and provided helpful comments to improve this paper. As usual, if you nd any errors, they are all mine.

complementary dimensions that Hammond, 2002), the need for affect one core thing (see gure 1 new deals among society, rms from problem to and organizations (Brugmann above): their dignity. opportunity and Prahalad, 2007; London, 2009; Moss Kanter, 1999), There are 4 billion people living My question and motivation is marketing (Karnani, 2007), with less than US$4 a day, and how can we use design and merging philanthropy and most of them are in developing innovation to (i) understand the nations. Their situation is getting situation better, (ii) design better capitalism (Akula, 2010), and focusing on aspirations that are worse due to increasing solutions to these problems, (iii) wider than just food, health, or inequalities in their possibilities increase the number of rms education (Cescau, 2008), for capturing new value creation, involved in social business, and among others. the effect of the poverty tax (iv) make it in sustainable ways. and catastrophes. The perspectives are many, yet Thus, my interest is on taking This situation creates a problem these problems as possibilities for our understanding is limited for reasons that range from lack of that goes beyond just limited solving some of the Worlds empathy about the problems of income, but includes higher cost toughest problems. the poor to misunderstanding for consuming many goods and the relevance of their dignity. services we take for granted, and understanding: Additionally, our mindsets and fewer and lower quality the need for a new frameworks affect (i) how we opportunities for personal, approach perceive and understand social professional and social development. People in these Many authors and practitioners realities and problems, as result, (ii) what we identify as relevant situations are called to be part of have helped us to understand variables, (iii) the design spaces the bottom of the pyramid. poverty and social problems we are able to create, and (iv) the from new perspectives. They face not only poverty, but Concepts such as bottom of the way we orchestrate and implement solutions. social challenges in a myriad of pyramid (Prahalad and

situation:

design for social business conference - milano - oct 2010

In this context, we need a new approach for integrating the views and methods from design, management and social sciences; but also we need to integrate the many perspectives about social business, sustainability, inclusion, and prot-making. Also, I think, we need to make explicit how uncertainty, risk, ambiguity and ignorance affect our design methods and frameworks, as well as our solutions.

SafeAgua (safe water) is an umbrella project aimed to solve the various waterrelated problems facing people in campamentos (slums) in Chile. It was developed by teams from Designmatters (Art Center College of Design, Pasadena) and Un Techo para Chile, along with people living in campamentos, and also included local companies such as Homecenter Sodimac- financing and distributing some of the solutions.

(positive+design)

thinking-driven innovation for social business

As stated by Steve Pinker (2006) not all ideas are for positive constructive change, and the same can be said about knowledge, techniques, methods and disciplines. When facing acute social problems, the word positive reaches a new meaning, because solving the Worlds toughest problems require a new mindset. Positive design goes beyond having a positive and new mindset, and aims at achieving a goal that is beyond just "good". Here, having a new mindset means being capable of perceiving reality in many different ways, and being insightful in making sense of those pieces of reality. That is, it's not the same to focus efforts on something we think is worth pursuing, than believing something deemed impossible can be achieved. One example of such an impossible challenge is the High-Cost Economy of the Poor problem described by Prahalad and Hammond (2002), which states that a same good or service has different prices for high or medium class and for poor citizens. Regardless if we talk about drinking water, access to credit, milk, telecommunications or food, the poor pays much more per unit. For instance, 1 liter of drinking water in rural villages or slums in Latin America is more expensive than in Manhattan. In the city of Santiago, the capital of Chile one of the economically best tted Latin-American countries-, a poor pays in average 42% more for the same basket of basic goods that any middle class person.

Solving and innovating in tough social problems requires being capable of taking a creative leap. This can result from training and learning to enhance openness and willingness to take these leaps (Kelley & Harteld, 1996). Moreover, as the authors stated, there is a difference between problem solving and creating beyond what the problem calls for. Verganti explains this by stating that design-driven problem solving is a process that can be inexhaustible in allowing companies to create new products (Verganti, 2006), but it also reaches beyond just products or the problem (Brown, 2009), and goes beyond companies and beyond prot generation. In order to do this, we need a special attitude towards problem solving that make designers (i) look at the world beyond the problem and patent (explicit) needs from multiple perspectives, (ii) think beyond what is reasonable or possible as limits of the problem, (iii) assume there is always a better solution than the status quo, (iv) explore and experiment constantly, and (v) work along and within another disciplines and people (Brown, 2008) [emphasis added, to illustrate the key issues]. Furthermore, as explained by Brown (2008), design thinking not only focuses on achieving functionality on fullling user needs, but also having an emotional effect, which is particularly relevant when it affects dignity. In

other words, design thinking-based innovation focuses in transforming the current user experience into the best possible user experience (Beckman & Barry, 2007; Buxton, 2007; Fulton-Suri, 2003). Here, I stress the point on user experience. One could innovate in products, services or process, and some authors have proposed that innovation processes for products are different than for services (Ulrich & Eppinger, 2004). I agree with this point. However, I think differently when the objective is innovating in the best possible experience that is enabled by a productservice-process-business model mix. This approach is at the core of design, but it reaches whole new dimensions when one goes from traditional markets to those facing social problems. The experience of being poor is not solved by a collection of things and services. First, rms need to identify and recognize the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) as a potential market. Second, they have to understand the latent needs of the people behind every one of the problems and opportunities that could be addressed. Usually, their latent needs are not visible and need to be discovered. Finally, the solution does not only have to do with providing the good or the service but with including the people, users or consumers as active

design for social business conference - milano - oct 2010

participants of the social constructs and dynamics that involve them, rather than merely recipients of goods and beneciaries of goodwill. Doing this, however, requires focusing the innovation process into the challenge at hand by taking a human-centered approach (Brown, 2008) that is focused into discovering the hidden aspects of the problem, understanding them from various and different perspectives, using anthropologic methods such as ethnographic research and metaphor elicitation- to discover areas of opportunity and insights in order to discover anomalies and create a unique and complete point of view about the problem. There is, however, an additional and fundamental difference when confronting acute social problems: solving these problems and avoiding recurrence requires going beyond what is necessary. In this context, necessary reaches a whole new meaning. Many social problems, especially those dealing with the poorest, are faced from the perspective of charity and, as result, they are often temporarily solved until the urgency pushing for charity decreases and resources start to become scarce. This raises an additional question: Is there space for a combination between purely prot-driven, and purely social-driven innovations? If so, what is the right combination. We are trying to understand this under the concept of inclusiveness.

In this context, we need a new approach that integrates the vision from various disciplines -design, human factors, management and technology- and is based on capabilities that could allow us to understand social problems in better ways, design better solutions, reach out and integrate more actors from various sectors of society, and create solutions that can be sustained in the long term (gure 1 summarizes these last paragraphs, and its shown in greater detail in the next page).

references

However, and particularly in this case, good understanding means little without action. In Chile, we are going beyond understanding and the learning we have had by experimentation, and we are trying to provoke change. During the Global Entrepreneurship Week, in November 2010, companies, the government and NGOs are uniting and theming the week as the Week of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, with leading participation of the President and the Minister for National Planning, who leads the poverty relief efforts.

Akula, V. 2010. Fistful of Rice: My Unexpected Quest to End Poverty Through Protability. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Beckman, S., & Barry, M. 2007. Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking. California Management Review, 50(1): 25-56. Brown, T. 2008. Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review (June): 1-9. Brugmann, J., & Prahalad, C. K. 2007. Cocreating Business's New Social Compact. Harvard Business Review, February. Buxton, B. 2007. Sketching User Experiences: getting the design right and the right design. San Francisco: Focal Press. Cescau, P. 2008. Social Innovation and Sustainable Development as Drivers of Growth, Rotman Magazine, Vol. Spring. Fulton-Suri, J. 2003. The Experience Evolution: Developments in Design Practice. Design Journal, 6(2): 39-48. Karnani, A. 2007. The Mirage of Marketing to the Bottom of the Pyramid: how can the private sector help to alleviate poverty. California Management Review, 49(4): 90-111. Kelley, D., & Harteld, B. 1996. The Designers Stance. In T. Winograd (Ed.), Bringing Design to Software: 151-170: Addison-Wesley. London, T. 2009. Making Better Investments at the Base of the Pyramid. Harvard Business Review, May. Moss Kanter, R. 1999. From Spare Change to Real Change: the social sector as beta site for business innovation. Harvard Business Review, May-June. Prahalad, C. K., & Hammond, A. 2002. Serving the World's Poor, Protably. Harvard Business Review, 80(9): 48. Ulrich, K., & Eppinger, S. 2004. Product Design and Development: McGraw-Hill Verganti, R. 2006. Innovating Through Design. Harvard Business Review, December: 114-122.

towards a new approach

Solving these social problems for good requires challenging our assumptions beyond our understanding about their dimensions, social realities, potential roles for different actors, the way we live our lives, and the way others could live theirs. We are facing new challenges in times of rapid change, provoked by shifts and discontinuities in demographics, technology, social habits and regulations. These changes affect and increase our ignorance about latent needs and sources for possible solutions. They also increase the ambiguity, uncertainty and risks associated.

Social Challenges, Shifts and Unknowns, and Questions for Development !