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[Music] [Music] uh I'd like to talk through some of the chapters uh uh uh that you have in your
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book uh uh and and some of the things that social entrepreneurs should be thinking about so to to begin with u you
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recommend that social entrepreneurs need to articulate the problem uh that they are trying to solve as well as a
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solution that they propose to offer could you take us through some of the steps that they should go through to do
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that um what we try to do is push people in into Thinking Beyond just sort of a high level problem there's a problem of
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nutrition or there's a problem of education and begin to think a little bit about what it is that the uh the
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so-called beneficiaries of this program are going to actually receive and and what the problem is from their
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perspective and whether they recognize that they have a problem so for instance in one of the projects in you relate to
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this thing mul in in India was the the concept of taking saet of disinfectant and distributing it in villages where
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the uh the water was unhygienic and people were subject to all sort of dis dentry type diseases gastric diseases
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and high death rates and so on when you arrive in the village it's not evident to the people
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in that Village who have very little education that the the connection between the diuretic diseases and the
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water and if you tell them that the water's bad and they can't see the microbes or bacteria in that they just
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don't believe you so you know it's really important to understand the problem not just from the point of view
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of the benefactor but also from the point of view of the beneficiary and so what we do in the
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book is we start to give them very systematic ways of beginning to unfold uh what the problem is in the eyes of
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the in the eyes of the person who's supposed to benefit one other chapter in
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your book refers to uh the need to segment the target population uh I Jim I wonder if you could help explain expl
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how that this process should work um ml mentioned in his M to your question M mentioned in in his first
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response this idea of of finding you know a group of these beneficiaries or a segment of them that has a higher
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likelihood of early adoption of what it is you're trying to do than you know
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others perhaps and again in the spirit of uh efficient use of resources and learning and you know the
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reduction of of of of risk and uncertainty what we we spend an entire chapter doing is framing a method for
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segmenting the beneficiaries and you know it's some of the typical segmentation uh instruments geographic
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location gender all of that but then there are also behavioral segmentation issues so what we have is we have a
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frame work for people to use to segment their beneficiaries and then to select one with which to start and we
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articulate the you know the characteristics of a good uh wedge if you will um uh and and and hopefully a
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segment that that is most likely to adopt in the shortest space of time at the lowest cost and provides you know a
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high rate of learning so that's you know there's a whole chapter devoted to that
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now as Mac as you said before sometimes a seemingly wonderful idea leaves the beneficiaries cold and unresponsive uh
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uh why why does that happen and what could social entrepreneurs do to uh prevent their Enterprises from falling
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into that trap well you know the the the fundamental problem is that people come
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in with what I call the wild eyed Western solution to a problem where you you expecting behaviors to
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take place in in defiance almost of deep-seated cultural behaviors there's some things that you know you just don't
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do so one of the projects that we looked at when I was in uh Cape Town a couple of years ago was the whole idea of uh
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beginning to distribute uh tricycles three-wheel bicycles so that women instead of having to carry uh their
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crops to the market could actually pedal their crops to the market and that sounds like a wonderful idea but when
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you arrive with the bicycles you find out that the the men have decided that women should not ride bicycles that's
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something only a man's allowed to do so there you know by not paying attention
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to what the cultural factors are they just they just wasted their time and and it's that type of thing uh going in with
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uh condoms uh to try and prevent AIDS and you don't take into account the fact
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that uh in many of the African societies of fertility is extremely well regarded a
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fertile woman a woman must be fertile and then secondly the sexual behavior is not taken into account and this woman
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goes to her husband and says uh you know I expect you to use a condom you got to
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be kidding she can get thrown out of that house she can get sent back to her original family and and live the rest of
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her life in disgrace because her husband has banned her from his home you know so
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this lack of of cultural sensitivity is often a huge problem why is it important for social
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entrepreneurs to identify the most competitive alternatives to the idea that they're trying to propose uh and
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how can they use this information that they gather to make their own offering more
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valuable there's always a competitor mul as you know Ma alluded to it earlier
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even if it's what they're doing today and we stress this because it forces people and we've done this
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ourselves it forces people into that environment and to spend time with their you know the beneficiaries they have in
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mind and the communities at large and by mapping out what the nearest alternative is to what you know
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the team has in mind in effect we're forcing them to build insight into the realities of
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that you know sector of the population on the ground as it exists and so that's the first thing the
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second thing is it gives a a methodical uh manner with which to compare step by step the idea that a
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team has for a social entrepreneurship activity versus what exists on the ground or could exist on the ground
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and so we use that to force people to get the kind of information that they should have and then to have a a fairly
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hard look at what it is they propose and how it Compares from the beneficiaries perspective with what they're already
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doing Ma what operational issues uh do social entrepreneurs need to address before they can deliver their product or
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service this is so important that we actually have the uh the would be social entrepreneur develop what what we call a
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deliverables table uh where the you need to be very clearly focused on articulating every
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that the beneficiary must go through in order to receive a benefit and then think a little bit about what it's going
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to take for that benefit to take place so uh let's say youve got a program in
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which you're Distributing product to uh Village communities out you know out in
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the boonies as they say uh you can't just assume that there's going to be a
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transportation system that will deliver that stuff you have to think a little bit about not just how is the product
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going to be sold but how is the product going to be transported to where you want it sold how are we going to know
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that we need to send more do we have a logistical system in place because in in many of these uh situations there just
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isn't the infrastructure to do it so what we're looking at here is what's
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specific operations from the time that the beneficiary first becomes aware that they have a need and you can fix it uh
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through uh the final delivery and consumption of that uh benefit has to be documented and then you got to sit down
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and sort of say what physically must happen because uh if the system isn't there it just ain't going to
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happen here was one project I think just in terms to illustrate it they had a program in lutu uh in which they were
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going to deliver uh medicines by motorbike cuz luta's got very bad roads but you can go on motorbikes to many of
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these places so they built this whole program with uh you know uh dozens of motorbike Riders taking taking samples
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and taking medicines out to remote areas and everything went fine until the motorbike started breaking down and then
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they suddenly found out that there was no one there to repair the motorbox so what you now have is like a mountain of
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on used motor BS in that have basically just G to waste the the the the next question is actually for both of you uh
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one of the things I found Most Fascinating about your book is the examples that you give of two companies
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uh Zambia feeds and eota uh and how they went through the different steps that you've just outlined so could you tell
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the knowledge at Wharton audience about these two companies and what are the main lessons that other social
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entrepreneurs can learn from their experience Zambia feeds is is a company in the
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Northwestern part of Zambia that basically produces fairly high quality animal feed
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at uh relatively good prices and the company started uh back in 2000 somewhere there um and has
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systematically uh built an alternative production system for poultry rearing in that
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region um at the end of last year they had nearly uh 2,000 customers um producing fairly
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efficiently really high quality poultry um so of course this had to scale over more than a
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decade uh the first thing um when we learned of this uh that we did was to sit down with the
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entrepreneur and say all right what is success for you and uh how do you know when you've got there and as simple as
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that sounds turns out that a lot of folks don't really think like that the reason we did it was because of the huge
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uncertainty in the area and um we put in place a few parameters um that the team needed to to commit to uh
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um in order for us you know to continue working with them not that you know not to be arrogant but you know uh we we we
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didn't want to commit ourselves to a team of people that was going to use the
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conventional you know let's come up with a great idea raise the money and go and
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build it approach and fortunately uh the team over there did um now we can't take
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all the credit we were working with a social entrepreneur from that environment and she had done this before
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not this kind of activity but she'd been in in in Commerce before so uh they
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started small you know as the book is the pick your segments geographic location accessibility Etc didn't buy
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news you know used equipment didn't buy buildings uh attended to the sociopolitics by starting it as an
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entrepreneurial venture within an existing company a big company that could provide some defense from
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interference and um they then spent the better part of of nearly seven years building an organization that
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systematically uh developed these new segments and in keeping with the philosophy of the book only began to ACR
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assets you know production assets when they needed to to ACR those uh th those assets to produce higher volumes at
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higher quality and fortunately for us that case was the first one we took on and
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it's been very very successful in fact they've impacted the the the whole
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industry in the country um to the degree where the entrepreneur when she retired
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last year was on the the national poultry Association uh board um and we use that case throughout
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the book as you know the kind of golden thread from the beginning through the end um as a way to show what was done
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um and it's it's the applicability of each of the tools and Frameworks to the
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case the other really interesting case you have is of a company called eota yeah uh can you tell us about that one
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too M do you want to take or eot was not something that we actually worked on but
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uh this was a project that one of the Warton students was involved in and uh when she took the course uh that we were
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teaching in entrepreneurship here uh what she did is start to bring to bear the whole concept that uh a gentleman
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called David Korea uh put together to provide sanitation facilities uh for people who you know
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were just basically using the streets and uh the interesting thing there is the is the segmentation of the markets
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because uh in adequate sanitation is a huge problem you know millions of people die
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every year under the age of five because of the diseases caused by inadequate sanitation and part of the challenge in
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the beginning was uh what we want to try to do is build these toilets which were
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you know functional uh and were senary but uh people were used to just using the
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streets and and uh and ditches and and things like that and uh you his problem is he had to charge money for them to
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use these toilets these facilities and people were basically thinking to themselves why the hell should I can pay
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we I can do it for nothing so the perceptual breakthrough uh was was enormous and so
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as he started to segment he had to think a little bit about make a distinction between the places where there many many
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people like in what they call the Estates which are basically the uh the slums in the east African towns uh where
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there were hundreds of thousands of people who were exposed to unsanitary conditions uh people in the towns were
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you had Municipal toilets uh but which were very very badly maintained and just basically not
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kept clean and and then people who could not just Avail themselves of uh you know
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uh kind of facilities uh at night where nobody could see them but uh uh and so as he started to focus in on which
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segment to go to he said let me try to find a place where uh people cannot uh you I cannot do it in in the open and
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then secondly where people do have some money and so the segment he chose was markets because people come to the
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markets they're there all day at the markets and uh and people who come to markets tend either to sell or to buy
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and that means they got some money and so he got the whole thing started by building in in in in market now the
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interesting thing about that particular project is that uh there were two what we call uh unexpected or out
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comes uh the first one was that these facilities that he built near the markets became attractive to women
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who were going to give birth to Children CU this was a place where you could go and give birth to your child and it was
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clean and it was sanitary and so it became a a birthing destination and not just a you know sort of defecation
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destination and so there was an unexpected consequence of what they were trying to do and uh the uh the other
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thing that they found is that uh the places where there were congregations of people with money uh were not only just
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markets but also Shel bus bus shelters places where buses congregated because large numbers of people go backwards and
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forwards all the time uh catching buses to and from the town and so they in a way discovered what the true segment was
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for that particular form of Enterprise uh neither of which had been anticipated in the beginning beginning but
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fortunately he didn't go and build you know a huge network of uh of toilets which no one was going to
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use that's a great example and and so to end you know I I I wonder what would you like knowledge at
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Warton readers and viewers to do uh to participate in your project uh so that you you can move it on to the next
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phase Jim what do you want when did you go yeah firstly read it um we we've taken a slightly different
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approach in the publication of this book as you know um there's this ebook uh that's going out pre-launch of
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the full book and what we're trying to do is use it you know in the spirit of
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uh of of the approach of the book you know start small uh and and change fast is we'd like to get responses from
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readers out there and we're going to use those not every response but we're going
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to use those responses to tweak if you will the balance of the book uh pre final
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publication um in October November this year and the third thing is spread the word uh you know if if any of our
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readers uh are in the space you know use the book to spread the word and if any of our readers know people in this space
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uh please get the book out there um we think it'll be useful and everybody we've tested it with has found it very
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very useful in the field nonprofit or for-profit so hopefully our readers can help us do that Ma any final words yeah
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you know the basic strategy at the moment is is our ebooks a free book we want to we want to give anybody access
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to it if they want to download the first piece which is the due diligence piece which will help people really think
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through if they want to do something that's going to do some good out there and increasingly people want to do that
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particularly the younger generation so uh the idea is that if you if you know of anybody who might be
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interested just send them the the uh the address the the URL and they can download it it's theirs we don't want to
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make money out of this uh what we want to do is is is have impact and uh uh you know anybody who you know who's
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making charitable contributions and may be a little concerned about how well those contributions are being spent and
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dispersed uh send them the the ebook and they can have a look at it because if I'm I mean I make donations uh I want to
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be able to think that my donations are being spent well rather than you know just spent uh squandered and uh the uh
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the idea would be is that anybody who's making donations today might want to
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have a look at it and then challenge the people to whom they're making it donations to see whether they're in fact
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following the disciplines we suggest uh to me this is not a popularity contest you know we're not there to be popular
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we there to have impact right well ma Jim thank you so much for speaking with knowledge at whorton yeah thank you uh
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was good to chat to you [Music]