The Road from Hyderabad

It's been three months since Tech4Society, and many of the ideas and conversations I encountered there are just beginning to sink in. In the weeks before the conference, Ashoka's Danielle Dumm wrote a series of posts on this blog called The Road to Hyderabad. There's something wonderfully chaotic about these posts, as they veer between the worldchanging ideas that Tech4Society would highlight and the practical complications and difficulties that go into planning a conference with participants from around the world. It seemed appropriate to bookend the conference with some thoughts of my own on the road from Hyderabad.

What Are We Building?

"This is the first time I've ever been to a conference in a construction zone," Phil Auerswald joked as he hosted the closing-night panel. He was talking about Hyderabad itself, a city whose ever-present cranes and bulldozers make it a symbol of a quickly changing India. "This conference is a construction zone." Phil said that like Hyderabad, Tech4Society was a place where people were quickly sharing tools, developing blueprints, and rethinking plans. "But if this conference is a construction zone," Phil asked, "what are we building?" Lemelson Foundation executive director Julia Novy-Hildesley replied, "The simplest and most profound answer is that we're building a better future."

Another answer might be that we're building a type of enterprise that thinks about what it's building and where it's taking the world. "We've already seen where the Henry Ford model takes us," Ashoka founder Bill Drayton said in his closing address. Bill spoke about what he calls the "historical accident" of NGOs and business existing in mutually exclusive "sectors" and said that the future depends on businesses built on empathy.

Investing in Lives

At that same panel, Youth Venture inventor Eden Full (previously discussed here) said that in her experience, education is based too much on meeting specific points on a checklist. "I like checklists," she said. "I just think they should be longer." Eden talked about the experiences in her life that made her into an inventor, and how many of those experiences were only tangentially connected to school, if at all. I'm not an inventor, but her point rang true and reminded me of many of my formative experiences.

I love the request Javier Fernandez-Han gave the inventors in the room: spend one our inspiring someone. As Javier explained how one afternoon with Ashok Gadgil changed his life, I realized that that's an experience that not even the best science teacher would be able to offer. These can't be chance encounters: we need to find ways to facilitate them as frequently as possible. As Javier said, "Think not only of investing in inventions, but also of investing in people's lives."

It deserves to be said: most science teachers can't interact with Eden and Javier as peers, though that doesn't mean that science teachers aren't important. One-hour-inspiring-someone interactions can happen far away from the classroom, far removed from the school curriculum. A teacher who developed curriculum for gifted students programs once told me, "Most of what it means to teach these kids is just to introduce them to the right people and get out of the way." Many times during the conference, I thought of the young inventors whose schools hadn't allowed them to come to Hyderabad, and wished that someone had gotten out of the way.

Breaking Boundaries to Share Ideas

In a discussion on scale, Science Commons' John Wilbanks said, "The Internet can be a powerful way to spread your mission. Technologies that were invented to share pictures of cats can also share lifesaving ideas." He was saying that inventor-entrepreneurs should take advantage of new media technologies to spread awareness of their missions and collaborate with other like-minded entrepreneurs. That's one way of thinking about scale: scale the mission by collaborating and workshopping with others carrying out similar missions around the world.

But it takes more than technology to foster those collaborations; it takes ongoing human capital too. When Richard Jefferson spoke about his plan for harnessing the patent system as a resource for social entrepreneurs, he said that it will take more than having a database in place. It takes staff to help users navigate the database. It takes legal experts who can clarify any rights issues and help negotiate on behalf of entrepreneurs.

Scaling the Enterprise or Scaling the Mission?

I noticed that many of the entrepreneurs at Tech4Society were talking about taking the systems they'd put in place to deliver a product or service to a certain community, and expand those systems to cover more products and services. When I met Greg Van Kirk, he was talking about how the MicroConsignment model is growing to bring a wider range of necessities to more people. TechSoup Global CEO Daniel Ben-Horin was talking about how TechSoup's model for delivering software to NGOs around the world is ultimately becoming more valuable than the software itself. Jack Sim told me that he sees toilets as the World Toilet Organization's test case: what he's really interested in is creating a platform for delivering any number of bottom-of-pyramid products. These are all ambitious ideas, and they'll work better if they can work together. As Bill Drayton said, "We have to share with each other. If we can't share, then we're back to the old kind of business."

One of the people I most enjoyed meeting at Tech4Society was Pradip Sarmah. Pradip invented a safer, more ergonomic rickshaw for rickshaw pullers in India. Just as importantly, he developed a system in which pullers could lease the rickshaws and eventually own them, something most pullers never achieve. Pullers can also make revenue from advertising on the rickshaws. This kind of holistic social enterprise was possible because Pradip intimately understood the needs of the communities he was working in.

After several people had explained their ambitious ideas for spreading their enterprises around the world, Pradip stood up and said, "I would need to think very hard before trying this idea in another country. I'd want to make sure I understand the real needs of that country, and make sure that the invention is really what's needed, or that it's not doing more harm than good." I thought Pradip's point was applicable to a lot of the enterprises represented at Tech4Society. As we grow to serve more people, we must be vigilant not to lose our connection to the people and communities we're serving.

I'm deeply grateful to Ashoka and the Lemelson Foundation for giving me the opportunity to experience this life-changing conference.