13 – The Local Innovation Principle

[00:00:00] Santiago: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Principle. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow. I am here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS.

Hi, David.

[00:00:15] David: Hi, Santiago. Looking forward to another Principle discussion.

[00:00:19] Santiago: Yeah, very much so. And today we have Local Innovation.

[00:00:24] David: Oh, I like this one.

[00:00:25] Santiago: I must say, I heard of Global Innovation a lot.

[00:00:29] David: The key point of this principle is we’re an international company. And we’re full of people who are mathematical scientists. There is a tendency for mathematical scientists to be quite arrogant in their own thinking. And and to value our ability to innovate over others.

And so this principle is a really challenging one for us and a really important one.

[00:00:52] Santiago: Before you get to it, let’s read our official description of the principle itself.

[00:00:57] David: Sounds good.

[00:00:58] Santiago: So the principle is something the company believes in and wants to support. It can empower communities both for today and the future while enabling interventions to adapt.

[00:01:08] David: Absolutely.

[00:01:09] Santiago: And I interrupted you because I still don’t see what you said about mathematicians related to that.

[00:01:16] David: It’s not necessarily just about mathematical scientists, but it’s about the fact that, if you take Silicon Valley approaches to tech development, it is this idea that in their bubble, they can make the innovations which impact people’s lives all over the world. And they have the smartest people, they can bring the smartest people in, brains from all over the world, to help them make the innovation on behalf of the world. That is the essence of innovation in a particular form. And I’m not saying that innovation is bad.

[00:01:49] Santiago: But the needs of the local people in under resourced environments could be very different to the needs of the neighbours of the Silicon Valley people.

[00:01:58] David: The context that they understand and so on. But I, don’t get me wrong, as with all the principles, it isn’t that the opposite or the contradiction of this is bad. Actually as a tech company, we are about global innovation. This is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build solutions, which help everyone and like the Silicon Valley approach, get out to people. But at the heart of our principles is the fact that we believe in, and we want to support innovation, not to be happening with us, but in the local environments in different ways.

[00:02:29] Santiago: And that’s where there’s a key word. And as we discussed many times, every word matters.

[00:02:34] David: Yes.

[00:02:35] Santiago: Empower.

[00:02:36] David: Exactly. This is a, it’s a principle which, of course, it relates to a lot of different things. It’s something which is, we’re not the only people to believe in local innovation, this is something where there are big groups supporting this. This isn’t unique to us. But it is something that we believe in and we want to support. And I’ve seen it in my work across the world. I’ve seen the need for it. And it’s hard.

I think this is the other thing that, we have to recognise. This particular principle is really challenging because it’s so much easier to sit wherever we are with the minds that we have access to and innovate on behalf of other people rather than actually building the tools, building the mechanisms, building the support structures, building the pipelines to be able to enable them to innovate.

That’s what is at the heart of this. It’s not about just us innovating. Innovation is in our name at IDEMS, but it’s not just our innovations. In fact, what this principle tells us is that we don’t value our innovations as much as we value our ability to support others to innovate in their environments.

It’s a tough ask for a tech company. So this is a hard principle for us to actually live by.

[00:03:59] Santiago: And I can see the relation with so many other of the principles in the Viral Scaling…

[00:04:08] David: Well, and Continually Evolving, both of those, this is one of the things which enables us to have adaptation, the word adapt at the end, there’s all this discussion in certain circles about adoption versus adaptation.

And we’re really firmly on the side of adaptation, but to be on the side of adaptation, local innovation is needed. And supporting good local innovation, so that you’re not just getting noise, which is leading to evolution, but you’re actually getting directed local innovation, leading to evolution.

[00:04:43] Santiago: Directed by whom?

[00:04:45] David: By, as we’ve got here, the communities. It’s empowering the communities to have that directionality in the way they evolve, because of the way they are adapted. You know, the maths of it is really easy. But actually, in practice, the implications of this are huge.

[00:05:04] Santiago: That’s not usually how funding works.

[00:05:08] David: I know. This isn’t about funding. No. It is about funding. It’s about actually, with the funding, how do we use the funding? What are we building? What are we, what is our role? But one of the things which is really important, this relates to, of course, the fact that as IDEMS International, we support counterparts in Kenya, in Ghana, Pakistan and elsewhere, to be actually doing the work with and for us.

[00:05:32] Santiago: They arguably understand their local context much better than we do.

[00:05:37] David: Maybe not. But what we are trying to do is we’re trying to embed their work into the local structures so that they can be creating and supporting this innovation. It’s not necessarily even about them innovating. But it’s about them being closer to the ground to enable innovation to happen. This is not easy.

[00:05:54] Santiago: And how have we done it?

[00:05:56] David: So, one of the cases I think that you’re quite familiar with, of course, is the sort of education side with STACK and where we’ve got university partners.

[00:06:06] Santiago: Before we go deep into this example, STACK is, an online assessment system for mathematics. And we work with African universities developing content for continuous assessment for courses.

[00:06:19] David: Absolutely, and we use some of our other principles, Capacity Building and so on, to have a team of interns who are the ones actually providing a lot of the support, and they are working closely with the lecturers. And I think one of the things which I’ve noticed happening just over the last year or so, is that there’s elements where those interactions with the local lecturers have led to them actually developing in ways that we wouldn’t necessarily have advised, or pushed.

[00:06:53] Santiago: The interns.

[00:06:53] David: The interns. And that’s part of that Local Innovation in our allowing the structures to be created to enable the counterparts to take the innovations for themselves, which suit their needs.

[00:07:05] Santiago: Yeah. Now that you mentioned it, I was at the beginning of the internship central in the communication with the lecturers.

[00:07:12] David: Yes.

[00:07:13] Santiago: But now I barely talk to any of the lecturers. Except one who’s leading, two actually, who are leading in their corresponding universities.

[00:07:23] David: Yeah. You’re talking about, presumably, Maseno and Masinde Muliro as the two main ones.

[00:07:27] Santiago: That’s right.

[00:07:28] David: Because you’ve talked to lots of other lecturers at different universities.

[00:07:29] Santiago: Yeah, of course. I’m thinking specifically about the work the interns are doing, which is in those two universities in Kenya, and the discussions with those two lecturers tend to be higher level discussions on strategy rather than on the local implementation and development of the resources.

[00:07:47] David: But you still supervise and play a key role for the interns.

[00:07:51] Santiago: And train.

[00:07:52] David: And train the interns. So the key thing to observe, if this is happening in that context, are there ways they are authoring questions, working on questions, which have changed or evolved based on their interactions with the lecturers that you could point your finger to. If not, then we haven’t yet got to the Local Innovation. What we’re trying to put in place is structures.

[00:08:15] Santiago: There are questions that I personally would have authored differently.

[00:08:18] David: Yes.

[00:08:19] Santiago: But I am letting the lecturers define how they want the questions to be authored, because they know their students, they know their context, and those questions might be different if we deploy them somewhere else.

[00:08:35] David: Absolutely. That’s, I would argue that might be part of the prerequisites to local innovation, but really this sort of comes into its own when those interns, who are locally part of that, maybe start interacting with more universities and they’re able to take the innovations they’re learning from one and bring them into another and see what one lecturer does and take it back.

So I think we’re putting in place the structures in that particular case, which you know well, to enable local innovation.

[00:09:04] Santiago: And it’s part of the ongoing training of the team. They’re no longer interns, they’re now part of the STACK team in INNODEMS.

[00:09:11] David: Yes.

[00:09:11] Santiago: But the training continues.

[00:09:13] David: Absolutely. And The aspect which is key to this is the human infrastructure. There’s a multi layered human infrastructure which is enabling and supporting innovation to happen, or trying to create the structures which can enable innovation to happen. Now, we have similar structures in most of our other projects that we try to build out.

The parenting work with PLH, Parenting for Lifelong Health. We have a team in Kenya, again, related to INNODEMS as well, that is now starting to work with the Ugandan team. And they’re trying to author differently and actually take ownership of that process. They’ve taken ownership of the WASH app.

[00:09:50] Santiago: Sorry, who’s trying to author differently?

[00:09:52] David: So in particular, the Kenyan team. So they’ve got a small team of people who are taking responsibility and really trying to build out their skills.

[00:10:01] Santiago: So the Kenyan team is now learning how to author for the Ugandan context.

[00:10:05] David: Yes, exactly.

[00:10:06] Santiago: Isn’t that in contradiction with the idea of local?

[00:10:11] David: It depends what level you’re looking at local. They’re part of the East African region. Yes, if there was a Ugandan team that was available, that would be great. But this is exactly where the idea is, local isn’t necessarily local.

[00:10:25] Santiago: How long is a piece of string?

[00:10:26] David: How long is a piece of string? To me, there’s so many different layers. Local could just be your village, or it could be your region, or it could be…

[00:10:36] Santiago: And in some cases, from village to village you need different interventions, you need adapted interventions.

[00:10:41] David: Absolutely, to their context, it depends about the differences in context and where we are in our development processes. My dream for this in the future, of course, is what if we can train youth in remote villages to have the skills to be able to build things, that they could then tailor and take things and build them and adapt them for their really local needs and context.

[00:11:02] Santiago: And I can see potentially, correct me if I’m wrong, but some of the agroecology interventions.

[00:11:09] David: Absolutely. So the agroecology interventions, there’s elements of this as well. One part of the question there is technology is much less central. So actually, although we’ve been involved in technology innovation in that context, a lot of what’s needed isn’t technology. I believe there’s a really important role for it to play, but it’s, it is about supporting rural communities in different ways.

I think there’s so many exciting elements of this principle of supporting, and this is central again to the wording. Unlike some of the other principles, the wording even of the beginning, this is something the company believes in and wants to support. It doesn’t say that we do this. This is actually very conscious in terms of our wording.

We believe in local innovation, we want to support local innovation, but we recognise this is a hard principle for us because we need to become profitable. We need our fundamental profitability, which is a whole other podcast in the main series.

And so actually local innovation isn’t generally part of IDEMS as an organisation. So this is hard for us. We’re trying to put in place structures which don’t make us central so we don’t become the all encompassing innovator. It’s not that everybody who’s doing this innovation is in IDEMS.

The INNODEMS example is really important. You know, we support INNODEMS, we provide work to INNODEMS, but they are an independent organisation. And that’s really important. We don’t want the innovation to be within us, we want it to be beyond us and that’s really hard in terms of enabling local innovation as a company.

[00:12:49] Santiago: Again, going back to the funding, that must create challenges in terms of generating revenue for IDEMS, if we are putting our partners, our local partners, central to the innovation, interventions.

[00:13:07] David: Yeah, they can out-compete us and they should out-compete us and we’ve had this with UNICEF that we are too expensive for UNICEF because if they have partners who are in lower resource environments, salaries are less and therefore they can provide similar services at a lower cost.

So if we train our local partners they will out-compete us for the local elements because they’ll have the skills to do that just as we would but they’ll cost less. So we are in some sense supporting people who can then out-compete us.

[00:13:35] Santiago: And we’ll then have to continually evolve and look for other sources of revenue.

[00:13:39] David: It’s another one of our principles, yes. But this is absolutely correct, that we as an organisation, it’s designed in such a way that if we are able to be in a position where people we support can out-compete us, then that means we need to evolve.

And that’s a good thing, not a bad thing, and we have structures which enable us to do that. We don’t have to necessarily continually grow. That’s some very conscious decisions we’ve made which lead to that. I think one of the things which is so central and so difficult around this principle for us as a company is the business models that are available for us are possibly less profitable and less sustainable, in terms of actually what we’re trying to build.

However, they are almost certainly more impactful. And so it’s a real element where our legal structures which allow us to prioritise impact over profit, without them I’m not sure we could do this.

[00:14:48] Santiago: Sorry, can you explain why that is?

[00:14:51] David: If we were in a position where we had to maximise profit, maximising profit, broadly, it puts you at the extremes. Either you want to centralise, because that’s what’s efficient and effective and then everybody else use it, or you want to remove yourself from the chain in such a way that you are extracting value.

[00:15:11] Santiago: Yeah, but that that’s not universally true. There are situations where trying to implement a silver bullet solution will not work.

[00:15:20] David: Absolutely. And that’s the other extreme. You can get to very localised solutions. Wix, website builder, this is a really good business model, these allow people to build and customise things for themselves. There you’ve got total flexibility on what you build, but you actually need quite a lot of resources and so there you’ll always need support and you’ll always need to be coming to people in different ways.

We’re looking to meet somewhere in the middle of this and it is going to be less directly profitable, but we believe the solutions that could come out are going to be more impactful. We understand why it is less profitable, but we don’t need to maximise profit. This is the Fundamentally Profitable podcast that we had, which is not one of our principles, but it is a part of the organisation, where we don’t need to maximise profit. We have to be profitable because otherwise we cannot exist and we cannot achieve our mission.

And so Local Innovation, we believe, and we’re inspired by groups like Red Hat and RStudio, they’ve been mentioned in other podcasts as well, where there are ways in which actually changing to more collaborative mechanisms of working can out-compete while being profitable. And that’s what we’re looking for. So we are not worried about maximising profit. We are worried about remaining profitable. That’s something we have to worry about.

[00:16:44] Santiago: Of course, we’re a business.

[00:16:45] David: We’re a business. But we believe that if we can remain profitable while supporting local innovation, actually there’s a good chance we will over time out-compete others who are less collaborative, because the solutions will be more locally adapted, because they will evolve over time into something which is more than it started out. If we can build the structures to enable all of this, there will be a role and we believe a profitable role for us going forward as well.

[00:17:15] Santiago: Okay, can I somewhat shift the discussion?

[00:17:18] David: Of course.

[00:17:18] Santiago: Options by Context is directly related. How is Local Innovation needed when we have Options by Context? What’s different?

[00:17:29] David: So again, it’s as with things like Continually Evolving, Local Innovation is one of the ways that you create new options for specific contexts.

[00:17:39] Santiago: But why then do we need a specially defined principle for this. Is it not included within Options by Context?

[00:17:45] David: No, absolutely not. You can very easily get a number of global options and just people just choose which one they want for their context. That is actually a mechanism which many people do. You have a menu of things to choose from and you do that. The whole point is, with Local Innovation, is you’re enabling people to create new options all the time. That’s the Continually Evolving part of this.

And so linking this in, I would argue that Options by Context, that’s a sort of mindset, this is a core part of the company. This is central to how we work, it’s central to everything we do in many different ways. Local Innovation can’t be as central because it’s a challenge for us, but it is something which should be included in our thinking whenever we can.

We should be supporting this wherever we can. We believe that this is part of creating the collaborative societies that we’re looking to support, enabling them to find better and better solutions than we can imagine, recognising our ignorance. We cannot know what is better for people in their contexts.

We can give them the tools to enable them, to empower them, to find their, I don’t like the word solutions but I don’t have a better word, to find their solutions in their environment based on the innovations that they bring.

[00:19:06] Santiago: Fascinating.

[00:19:07] David: And I think maybe one of the things which is worth just mentioning is the word interventions.

[00:19:13] Santiago: Okay.

[00:19:14] David: It’s a word which when we’ve discussed this is one which jars with me. Now just like I don’t particularly like solutions. I don’t particularly like the word interventions.

[00:19:24] Santiago: Why not?

[00:19:26] David: It implies you’re intervening. There’s an element of intervening. Intervention is you’re intervening in something. So who’s intervening? Why are they intervening? Who gave you the right to intervene?

[00:19:39] Santiago: But arguably anything you do is an intervention. Unless you stay still and isolate completely, you are intervening.

[00:19:47] David: Yes, there’s an argument about that, but many people would argue that, within a community, things that are happening, that’s just what’s there within the community. Whereas it’s somebody external intervening in a community, which is really what an intervention is.

[00:20:02] Santiago: But here you’re talking about local communities acting within their….

[00:20:08] David: And this is the key thing. I believe that part of this and part of the reason we settled on interventions is that there is not a problem. In fact, we actually want global interventions to interact with local innovation. This is the key thing. So actually there is an element of externality in terms of this. That linking between the global and the local is important. And this is giving light to this idea that there are going to be interventions from the outside world coming in. And that’s okay.

It’s how they’re adapted locally, which is so important and so valuable. To take interventions out is to remove the aspect that the world as a whole is changing and much of this progress is good. And one of the greatest interventions of the last 100 years has been medical. Actually understanding how through medical interventions we have been able to extend life expectancy and all sorts of other things, have very positive benefits in many ways, there have always been challenges, but the idea of actually having better healthcare as an intervention in many remote low resource communities, this is an intervention. How can we make the healthcare better? That requires local innovation.

So that’s part of what we’re recognising is that there is this duality between, we’re not necessarily talking about totally isolated communities innovating. We’re talking about things where there is a connection.

[00:21:41] Santiago: Yeah, I see what you mean. You could, say, go with a group of doctors and treat the people in the remote village and then go away, but unless the local people change their medical care it’s not going to be sustainable, it’s not going to…

[00:22:00] David: I guess that particular example so okay you go in for a fixed period of time, you might be able to have an impact then when you leave, things will come up whether you don’t have the right person there. So then a lot of the effort shifted to building clinics and then once you build a clinic, who is there in the clinic? Who’s manning it? What expertise do they have? And how do you make sure that clinic is serving the purpose locally? And so what I’m saying is that there are interventions.

Building a road is an intervention. You know, how do we make sure that the way it’s integrated into the society and it’s changing the community is done to the benefit of the community? That requires local innovation. Changes are happening across the world. And those changes are often globally influenced. Not to recognise that is to be naive about the world. Global influence is the biggest driver of change in pretty much any local community.

[00:22:55] Santiago: And the interventions are coming as you say, and what you are looking for is to give the local communities the ability to be able to grab those interventions.

[00:23:08] David: Exactly. It’s not just to adopt them as they come, but to adapt them to their local needs. That’s exactly the idea of Local Innovation on this, to try and actually recognise globalisation can be an extremely powerful good thing, and it does have externalities in terms of the interventions that are coming in. But, really important to that is local innovation to make sure that the community is maintained, valued, and it grows in a way which is not just locally acceptable but enables the local community to thrive.

[00:23:45] Santiago: Fascinating. Thank you very much.

[00:23:48] David: Thank you. One of my favourite principles, so thank you for discussing it.