Open Studios & Network Effects

Perhaps the most remarkable talent that Jan Chipchase showcased in his talk last week (I promise this is my last post on the subject) was his ability to create powerful community-based organizations on the fly in some of the least likely environments - urban slums in Ghana for example. While this started out as a SWAT activity to support rapid immersion and research, with Open Studios he is making his pop-up organizations much more visible in the community (which raising some interesting branding questions which I will cover in a later post).

If you havent checked out Open Studios, the basic idea is that Chipchase and team turn their SWAT ethnography into a  design lab - reaching out to the community in a very visible way to gather ideas as part of a competition. The samples he showed last week centered around a competition to design your dream mobile handset. I have to say I was a bit disappointed in the topic. Seemed like they got alot of cheesy hardware design. Jan was clear the real value was not the designs themselves, but the needs and desires implicit in those designs. But I think he may be missing an even bigger opportunity to create value. 

What if they werent temporary (lasting for only a week or two)? what if he used the Open Studios model to identify the most engaged and insightful members of a community and then continued to communicate with them on an ongoing basis? He could distribute free phones to them for this purpose. They would receive free minutes each month in return for answering an SMS survey. This would give him an ongoing mechanism for gathering information about invisible markets at the 'Base of the Pyramid" (BOP) and understanding their evolving needs and habits.

Well that is exactly what Melanie Edwards of Mobile Metrix is trying to do. I had the privilege to work closely with her as part of the Pop!Tech Fellows Program last month. Melanie was inspired by the huge gap in our understanding of even the most basic demographics within these invisible communities. As you are probably aware, there is a huge migration of the world population into urban slums. They are quickly becoming the dominant condition for our global population. In sitting through Jan's talk about Open Studios I was struck by the similarities. Melanie has also been working in the Flavela's in Brazil. But her goal is to put in place a network of local youth to gather demographic data and distribute products and services on an ongoing basis.

There are nice synergies to her approach - corporations are increasingly interested in tapping this growing market as it is somewhat of a green field from a brand perspective (as they have never been marketed direclty to before). By gathering data and partnering with corporations like J&J she is putting these communities on the map. As the value of these new markets grow, so will their ability to get the support and services they desperately need. Or that is the hope.

All right, you can take the cyncial view that opening up slums to sales of shampoo is not exactly virtuous. But many people would disagree. The only way to impact poverty and social issues at scale is to find a way to make money at it. Melanie is developing partnerships to deliver crtiical support services through her network. The best example is an initative that she ran around Dengue fever with J&J. You can read about it in this recent post on Worldchanging. She exposed communities to products but also educated them about health risks and preventative steps they could take to avoid the disease. J&J benefited from exposing a new market to their products related to Dengue. And the community benefited. Pretty sweet! By using local youth she gained access and ensured that the information was delivered in a way that the community would understand. This is an important two-way collaboration in which she is learning as much from her local network as they are learning from her (sound familiar).

This 'Network Effect' is becoming a theme as I talk to social impact organizations around the world. Much of their potential value is stored in this type of networl. Their impact is determined more than anything else by how effective they are in setting up and managing a distributed network within distributed communities. This is equally true for Tevis Howard (another Pop!tech fellow) who is working on a microforestry program in Kenya and Wendy Brawer from GreenMap who I chatted with at a recent Social Entrepreneurship conference at NYU. Effective social entrepreneurs learn quickly that their ability to build networks - and to scale and replicate those networks - is by far their biggest challenge and most valuable asset. Which also happens to be one of Jan's greatest skills..and perhaps his biggest waste.