You say, “First, donors and investors end up allocating money inefficiently. Second, the lack of a market-like mechanism for weeding out unsuccessful ventures slows down innovation.” However, by writing this article you have helped others consider dimensions of poverty alleviation that might not have occurred to them. If you think about the private sector there are lots and lots of failures that creates the scaffolding that an eventual success builds on.
Thanks too for pointing out cultural issues that are important in development. So often it seems we are only interested in improving demographic statistics of DALYs. But there is this other huge aspect of development that is crucially important. Thanks for writing this note.
Isabella I liked your story. It shines a light on the important topic of the metrics of success. I have spent most of my life in seafood and we are now working with various NGOs who want to make a positive impact on the lives of fishers and farmers but we sometimes do not understand the social-economic dynamics you point out as well as appreciating that producer focussed activities will have limited impact if one does not examine, understand and address the supply and financial chain inefficiencies and barriers. So much money seems to be wasted continually testing theories and applying western logic that has sprung from hackathons or desks in Stanford. We need to embed positive actors within the supply and financial chains that control the movement of produce and money. Technology is definitely a game changer there but it is not in the game. It can provide us with visibility which helps us to manage a situation but without control we cannot improve situations. Our fishers and farmers are trapped in a vicious cycle that we need to reverse by not just handing them technology and hope they use it. We need to buy their produce and provide them with technology that will help them produce better quality produce and reduce waste. We don’t have to displace positive, transparent and collaborative intermediaries that offer value, just those that don’t. It is too important for us to fail and we cannot sit around and watch any longer.
Great piece. ‘Failure reports’ are still too rare, especially candid and insightful ones. A key lesson here—which is applicable to many such efforts—is that one must really understand the SYSTEM that one is trying to change, notably including the real preferences and behaviors of users, and not just a particular intervention. This perspective is often ignored, especially by those who focus primarily on a technology. (And this is yet another situation where an ‘adaptive challenge’ was treated more like a ‘technical problem,’ a distinction set out in the SSIR piece ‘Leading Boldly’ by Heifetz et al. from Winter 2004.)
This is a very insightful piece. “A social venture will fail, or should fail, if it can’t meet the needs of its customers or beneficiaries more efficiently than its competitors - See more at: http://ssir.org/articles/entry/harvesting_lessons#sthash.9WPLwvYs.dpuf”. This is a take from the article as most ambitious Social Entrepreneurs fail to address this question critically from the beginning. Perhaps we need to re-look at issues such as a Customer Value Proposition and how that can help in the navigation process of the business.
This is a good write-up and an honest assessment, which is all too rare in development projects. I experienced a similar epiphany while advising a rural marketing project in Indonesia about 10 years ago. The NGO rhetoric that guided the project was ‘cut out the middleman’, but in doing so we discovered that all we had achieved was to replace the traditional (flawed) middleman system with a much less efficient system that did the farmers no favours. As you say, if the project fails to improve conditions for the beneficiaries, then it must fail. But hopefully it learns something in the process. In our case, the lesson was to not plan projects around untested assumptions and commonplace development tropes.
Thanks for coming forward to share this story. Another aspect which occurred to me was that it also boils down to how far one is willing to go to achieve the outcome. In my experience, As far as the social innovation goes I think one give in is that the ecosystem is fragmented or worse doesn’t exist. Thus solutions have to take into consideration what it takes to deliver the solution within these constraints or maybe find ways to build that ecosystem. Another issue is defining what you mean by scale and how quickly you want to scale. Often scaling solutions develop for under served communities takes time. This is important to develop organically and also build strong foundations and business processes. More often than not we call it failure just because it didn’t take off within a time frame but I think that’s ok for social enterprises to take a little logger. Finding aligned investors who understand this is not impossible.
Thus I think one has to consider needs of customers within these contexts and importantly the philosophy of why social enterprises throw their hat into the game to devise solutions for customers in regions that are largely ignored. It’s not an easy job but someone needs to do it. But it will take time.
COMMENTS
BY John Byrd
ON December 10, 2015 02:13 PM
You say, “First, donors and investors end up allocating money inefficiently. Second, the lack of a market-like mechanism for weeding out unsuccessful ventures slows down innovation.” However, by writing this article you have helped others consider dimensions of poverty alleviation that might not have occurred to them. If you think about the private sector there are lots and lots of failures that creates the scaffolding that an eventual success builds on.
Thanks too for pointing out cultural issues that are important in development. So often it seems we are only interested in improving demographic statistics of DALYs. But there is this other huge aspect of development that is crucially important. Thanks for writing this note.
BY Alistair Douglas
ON December 10, 2015 08:45 PM
Isabella I liked your story. It shines a light on the important topic of the metrics of success. I have spent most of my life in seafood and we are now working with various NGOs who want to make a positive impact on the lives of fishers and farmers but we sometimes do not understand the social-economic dynamics you point out as well as appreciating that producer focussed activities will have limited impact if one does not examine, understand and address the supply and financial chain inefficiencies and barriers. So much money seems to be wasted continually testing theories and applying western logic that has sprung from hackathons or desks in Stanford. We need to embed positive actors within the supply and financial chains that control the movement of produce and money. Technology is definitely a game changer there but it is not in the game. It can provide us with visibility which helps us to manage a situation but without control we cannot improve situations. Our fishers and farmers are trapped in a vicious cycle that we need to reverse by not just handing them technology and hope they use it. We need to buy their produce and provide them with technology that will help them produce better quality produce and reduce waste. We don’t have to displace positive, transparent and collaborative intermediaries that offer value, just those that don’t. It is too important for us to fail and we cannot sit around and watch any longer.
BY Louis Boorstin
ON December 12, 2015 09:04 AM
Great piece. ‘Failure reports’ are still too rare, especially candid and insightful ones. A key lesson here—which is applicable to many such efforts—is that one must really understand the SYSTEM that one is trying to change, notably including the real preferences and behaviors of users, and not just a particular intervention. This perspective is often ignored, especially by those who focus primarily on a technology. (And this is yet another situation where an ‘adaptive challenge’ was treated more like a ‘technical problem,’ a distinction set out in the SSIR piece ‘Leading Boldly’ by Heifetz et al. from Winter 2004.)
BY Nelson Amo
ON January 15, 2016 02:00 AM
This is a very insightful piece. “A social venture will fail, or should fail, if it can’t meet the needs of its customers or beneficiaries more efficiently than its competitors - See more at: http://ssir.org/articles/entry/harvesting_lessons#sthash.9WPLwvYs.dpuf”. This is a take from the article as most ambitious Social Entrepreneurs fail to address this question critically from the beginning. Perhaps we need to re-look at issues such as a Customer Value Proposition and how that can help in the navigation process of the business.
BY Dominic Elson
ON February 14, 2016 11:22 PM
This is a good write-up and an honest assessment, which is all too rare in development projects. I experienced a similar epiphany while advising a rural marketing project in Indonesia about 10 years ago. The NGO rhetoric that guided the project was ‘cut out the middleman’, but in doing so we discovered that all we had achieved was to replace the traditional (flawed) middleman system with a much less efficient system that did the farmers no favours. As you say, if the project fails to improve conditions for the beneficiaries, then it must fail. But hopefully it learns something in the process. In our case, the lesson was to not plan projects around untested assumptions and commonplace development tropes.
BY Nisa
ON October 10, 2016 08:17 AM
Thanks for coming forward to share this story. Another aspect which occurred to me was that it also boils down to how far one is willing to go to achieve the outcome. In my experience, As far as the social innovation goes I think one give in is that the ecosystem is fragmented or worse doesn’t exist. Thus solutions have to take into consideration what it takes to deliver the solution within these constraints or maybe find ways to build that ecosystem. Another issue is defining what you mean by scale and how quickly you want to scale. Often scaling solutions develop for under served communities takes time. This is important to develop organically and also build strong foundations and business processes. More often than not we call it failure just because it didn’t take off within a time frame but I think that’s ok for social enterprises to take a little logger. Finding aligned investors who understand this is not impossible.
Thus I think one has to consider needs of customers within these contexts and importantly the philosophy of why social enterprises throw their hat into the game to devise solutions for customers in regions that are largely ignored. It’s not an easy job but someone needs to do it. But it will take time.