Mr. Harmon Returns from One Place to Another
SocEntChat: Innovation, Education, and Change
March 24, 2010
Originally published at AshokaTech.
Ashoka hosts a monthly, Twitter-based chat called SocEntChat, in which anyone can participate and discuss issues surrounding social enterprise. It's a great place to share ideas. This month's chat was all about technological innovations, hosted by Ashoka's Tom Dawkins. Along with the usual crowd, Tech4Society organizer (and Twitter newcomer) Rosa Wang was there to share reflections from the conference. You can read the full transcript here.
Tom's first question was, "What breakthrough invention do you think will reshape the lives of the poor?" There were a lot of good answers - mobile phones, solar power, clean water - but I wondered if perhaps the question was too broad for there to be any one good answer. In a Tech4Society panel on mobile phones, for example, Ashoka-Lemelson fellow Madan Mohan Rao said that the increase in mobile phone use in rural India has the unintended consequence of limiting women's ability to communicate, as over 90% of family mobiles are carried by men. According to Rao, social equity still requires landline phones. In this way, what's more important than a specific technological solution is a willingness to pay attention to the needs you're meeting. The high-tech solution isn't always the better one, even if the low-tech one is more difficult.
Some of us got to wondering if maybe the most important innovations aren't in the inventions themselves, but in new ways that inventions can spread and reproduce and inventors can collaborate across continents and centuries. One of my favorite thoughts to come out of Tech4Society was this inspiring sentiment from John Wilbanks:
There's a big world of entrepreneurs out there just hacking in the real world. First life, if you will. High touch, not high tech.
Being enveloped in their world for a few days gave me a lot of new perspectives on the open access and open educational resources movements. … I now get at a deep level the way that obsessive cultures of information control in the scholarly and educational literature represent a high tax, inbound and outbound, on the entrepreneur, whether social or regular. If you don't know the canon, you're doomed to repeat it. And we don't have the time, the money, or the carbon to repeat experiments we know won't work. We can't afford to let good ideas go un-amplified, because we need tens of thousands of good ideas.
So how do good ideas get amplified? Wilbanks' Science Commons is one way; so is Cambia. And, for that matter, even more pedestrian Internet tools. As Wilbanks said in a panel discussion, "Technologies that were invented to share pictures of cats can also share lifesaving ideas."
Question two was, "How can young people be inspired to become inventors or inventor-entrepreneurs?" Christine Turner had a great reply: "Find ways to minimize the fear of failure. I think that is what gets in the way of a lot of inventors/entrepreneurs."
Fear certainly gets in the way, but sometimes teachers get in the way too. As a rather dour footnote to the inspiring Youth Venture session at Tech4Society, Charles Tsai told me that a few of the young inventors who'd been invited to Hyderabad couldn't come because their schools wouldn't allow them to take time away from class. Allowing young people to pursue the things they excel at is hugely important, both for their education and for our future.
The question makes me think again of Javier Fernandez-Han and his story of how Ashok Gadgil inspired him to become an inventor. Javier's simple challenge, spend one hour inspiring someone, could be the secret to starting the careers of the next generation of inventors. As I had dinner with Javier and Gadgil and saw them interact as colleagues in the scientific community, I wondered how we could create more opportunities for the Ashok Gadgils of the world and the Javier Fernandez-Hans to meet. It seems essential.
As an interesting side discussion, some of us started talking about the idea of play and how play contributed to the life of the inventor-entrepreneur. I suggested that in working with young people, we shouldn't have to choose between instilling values and playing in the sandbox: the sandbox is where you learn values. Joe Brown agreed that the sandbox is important, but said it's not the only place where values get instilled. "What motivates the playing in the first place?" he asked.
At Tech4Society's closing panel, Phil Auerswald posed a similar question to Lemelson Foundation executive director Julia Novy-Hildesley. Should we teach children science for its own sake, or should we teach kids science for the sake of social and environmental change? She replied, "Make those things the grains of sand you play with."
Tom's final question was, "If tomorrow you were granted $1 mlllion for investment in the social invention/innovation space, where would you put it?" I'll let people's great answers to this one speak for themselves:
Kendall Thiessen: I'd build an open innovation forum to connect social entrepreneurs, universities and inventors.
Elliot Harmon: A legal fund for negotiating patent issues on behalf of social entrepreneurs.
Nidhi Chaudhary: I would create more effective collaborations between research, implementation, and existing institutions. Let's build, not reinvent!
David Ewaku: Invest in improving the communication density in marginalised places.
Rosa Wang: I would sprinkle money on several very early stage "wild card" social invention/innovation ideas.
Photo: epugachev, CC license
