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"The End of Social Innovation"

A Retrospective on Social Innovation

(First appeared in The Stanford Daily, 6/1/2005)

All things must come to an end, and this is the end for our social innovation column. It’s been a bumpy ride (just ask our editors), but it was worth it in order to make a simple point: dedicated and talented people can create positive social change.

Since we’re in college, we’re expected to know something about needless suffering in the world—and even to care about it. (“Isn’t there a crisis in Sudan right now? That’s terrible.”) But there’s little expectation to know about solutions to this suffering. And there’s even less expectation to promote them in the real world.

Fortunately, not everyone feels this way. Every other week, we met “social entrepreneurs” who were, without a doubt, much cooler than us. Not only did they know and care about social problems, they had practical ideas about how to improve them.

Is local poverty intractable? We met Elliott Brown, a Stanford graduate who realized that one of the biggest problems facing the poor is not how find a job—but how to create a career. Elliott started Springboard Forward in East Palo Alto to help end poverty through job-coaching and support for the working poor.

Can technology really help the poor in Brazil? We met Melanie Edwards, a Stanford fellow who realized that everyday PDAs could help the “invisible” poor of Brazil. Her organization, MobileMedia, employs Brazilian youth with PDAs to register the uncounted people of Brazil for social services and benefits.

Is modern healthcare out of reach for developing countries? We met David Green, who started Project Impact to help bring down the prices of key medical products. He developed technologies and production strategies aimed at maximizing distribution—not profits. He does this all while still being economically sustainable.

Do consumers even care about “fair-trade”? The social entrepreneur Paul Rice started TransfairUSA to find out. After working with farmers in Nicaragua for eleven years, he returned to the USA to help market fair-trade products. Consumers are buying fair-trade products, and it is returning more profits directly to the farmers that create them.

Is human rights best left to the states and the UN? Armed with video cameras and expertise, Gillian Caldwell has helped human rights organizations capture human rights abuses on film. As director of WITNESS, she works with NGO’s to film human rights abuses and leverage them to create change.

One last one: is it possible to help start small businesses in Africa? Stanford graduate and enginneer Martin Fisher helped to do just that. With his organization ApproTEC, he created and marketed water pumps in Kenya that allow people to grow crops throughout the year. It has helped tens of thousands of Kenyans improve their salary by an order of magnitude.

So when we say these people are cooler than us, we mean it. Collectively, these entrepreneurs and their organizations have literally improved the lives of thousands of people who otherwise would have went without these basic life necessities.

Why don’t we hear more about the solutions to the problems we already hear so much about? In part, because there are no perfect solutions. No one thinks they have “solved” poverty, or human rights abuses, or unfair trade. No one thinks that their solutions didn’t also cause some problems elsewhere.

But that didn’t stop them, and it shouldn’t stop us. There are no perfect circles, or perfect term papers, or perfect business plans—but this doesn’t stop us from designing, writing, or starting businesses. Everything has a cost, everything has a flaw. The question is, on balance, are we doing the best we can?

Before we go, we would like to thank some people who helped us put together this whole thing. Thanks to all the students in FUSION (in particular to Tony Wang), and to all the people and organizations we interviewed, bothered, and etc. We appreciate it.

Finally, thanks to all the people that emailed us and approached us to tell us how meaningful this column has been to them. This outpouring of support and interest in our column and interviews has made us feel—know—the entire effort has been worth it.

Is this the end of social innovation? Graduation marks the end of the column, but not of social innovation. Rather, graduation marks the beginning—when students stop being students and, with luck, become advocates for positive social change.

Wow, great article. How can I read them all?

All the interviews with outstanding social entrepreneurs and articles have been collected into a report on social innovation. It is available below for easy reading, printing, and sharing.

The Story of Social Innovation:
Interviews with Social Entrepreneurs