Ok, so I'm the first to admit that sometimes things NEED to be fixed or helped along or tampered with... but I recently was reading an article in a Yellowstone Park publication, and there was the following quote from a man who gave a presentation at their Scientific conference last year.
"Today we are both burdened and invigorated by a powerful sense of crisis, and I can tell you that in the history of the national parks, crisis is the highest form of peril."
He goes on to offer several "sweeping generalities that historians are so fond of". The first two are: "Pretty much every generation of us since Comstock's time has contained a majority of people, even among the scientists, who were absolutely convinced that they kneww all they needed to know in order to do right by Yellowstone. Second, they were always wrong."
The writer notes that he doesn't mean they always did the wrong thing, but "their confidence in doing whatever they did was rarely as warranted as they imagined."
I find it refreshing that ANYONE admits to those two truths, especially a scientist. But, what struck me, is how those two statements could be applied to many, if not all, aspects of our current society. Science especially seems inclined (to me) to make certain absolute statements, with no indication that the scientists recognize that they are human and fallible and that scientists across the ages have thought they had "the answer" only to have it disproven later.
And, what about politics or civil issues such as our military or our citizens needs / problems? Each area has it's "experts" who announce they've got "The Solution" if we'd all just listen to them.
What is my point? Not sure I have one, except that I'm not sure that we always need "The Solution". One other point the speaker in the above article made was this: "... we have sold nature short, underestimating its power, its resilience, its complexity, and its capacity to surprise us with unimagined consequences of our well-intentioned attempts to care for it." We have a tendency to feel a need to "fix" everything, when often the best option is to back off & let it fix itself. No, I don't think that's ALWAYS the answer, I just think it's the answer more often than we'll admit.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Interesting Idea to help the poor in developing countries
Ok, so you all know that I love many (not all) the articles in Wired magazine. I am posting a portion of one article from that magazine here.. It has an interesting take on how we should help developing countries.
"The Tata Group, India’s version of Acme and maker of the supercheap Nano automobile, recently introduced a $22 water purifier that works without electricity or running water. (Every few months it needs a new $6 filter.) A big-hearted, philanthropic, and important effort? You bet—cue the somber stats about preventable waterborne diseases. But check out the size of the market for a product like that: Some 900 million people worldwide lack access to clean water, 200 million of them in India alone. Tata is saving lives and making a killing.
That’s why, at next year’s G-whatever meeting in France, world leaders would do well to rip up those big checks to tin-pot autocrats and channel the cash to startup companies instead. Help those companies make cheap, useful products to sell to the world’s poor, who will use them to become less poor, and everybody wins. Management guru C. K. Prahalad advocated this very idea six years ago in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, and now a few companies like Tata are putting it into action.
D.Light Design is a case in point. After witnessing the inefficiencies and harmful health effects of kerosene lamps as a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin, Sam Goldman returned to the US to earn an MBA and pursue a very specific agenda: Replace kerosene lighting, everywhere, with inexpensive solar-powered LED lamps. Three years ago, he launched D.light to produce such lamps and has already sold 250,000* to customers throughout the developing world at an average price of $20 apiece. The company hopes to light the homes of 50 million people by 2015.
Another example: Forty percent of humanity gets by on less than $2 a day, and most of those people are rural farmers. Efficient drip irrigation systems could triple or quadruple their yields while reducing their costs, but manufacturers haven’t bothered making drip systems for tiny farms. In 2004, a company called Global Easy Water Product began selling a setup that can be used for small plots. The price: $32.50 per quarter acre. In just two years as a for-profit venture, it has sold more than 250,000 units in India.
“Conventional development economics was always about increasing per capita income to a certain level before people become consumers,” says Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. The new view flips that logic on its head: Providing access to modern technologies by creating supercheap products may, in fact, be the best way to improve economic well-being. For entrepreneurs, the race is on to tap that massive population of penny-wielding consumers-in-waiting. Put another way, if Coke and Marlboro can sell to the world’s poor, companies whose products are actually useful should be able to do it, too.
(Here the article discusses the path such companies need to take to get those products developed at a low cost)
The trick is balancing affordability and quality. In a Harvard Business Review article last year, Govindarajan, together with Tuck colleague Chris Trimble and General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, wrote that people in emerging markets “are more than happy with high-tech solutions that deliver decent performance at an ultralow cost—a 50 percent solution at a 15 percent price.” That’s not a green light for lame products, though. As in any market, what’s being sold has to fill an unmet need. The poor may be poor, but they’re not stupid.
Contributing editor David Wolman (david@david-wolman.com) wrote about diploma mills in issue 18.01.
*Correction appended Sept. 23, 2010 at 2 pm. D.light has sold more than 250,000 lamps, not 20,000 as previously reported.
"The Tata Group, India’s version of Acme and maker of the supercheap Nano automobile, recently introduced a $22 water purifier that works without electricity or running water. (Every few months it needs a new $6 filter.) A big-hearted, philanthropic, and important effort? You bet—cue the somber stats about preventable waterborne diseases. But check out the size of the market for a product like that: Some 900 million people worldwide lack access to clean water, 200 million of them in India alone. Tata is saving lives and making a killing.
That’s why, at next year’s G-whatever meeting in France, world leaders would do well to rip up those big checks to tin-pot autocrats and channel the cash to startup companies instead. Help those companies make cheap, useful products to sell to the world’s poor, who will use them to become less poor, and everybody wins. Management guru C. K. Prahalad advocated this very idea six years ago in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, and now a few companies like Tata are putting it into action.
D.Light Design is a case in point. After witnessing the inefficiencies and harmful health effects of kerosene lamps as a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin, Sam Goldman returned to the US to earn an MBA and pursue a very specific agenda: Replace kerosene lighting, everywhere, with inexpensive solar-powered LED lamps. Three years ago, he launched D.light to produce such lamps and has already sold 250,000* to customers throughout the developing world at an average price of $20 apiece. The company hopes to light the homes of 50 million people by 2015.
Another example: Forty percent of humanity gets by on less than $2 a day, and most of those people are rural farmers. Efficient drip irrigation systems could triple or quadruple their yields while reducing their costs, but manufacturers haven’t bothered making drip systems for tiny farms. In 2004, a company called Global Easy Water Product began selling a setup that can be used for small plots. The price: $32.50 per quarter acre. In just two years as a for-profit venture, it has sold more than 250,000 units in India.
“Conventional development economics was always about increasing per capita income to a certain level before people become consumers,” says Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. The new view flips that logic on its head: Providing access to modern technologies by creating supercheap products may, in fact, be the best way to improve economic well-being. For entrepreneurs, the race is on to tap that massive population of penny-wielding consumers-in-waiting. Put another way, if Coke and Marlboro can sell to the world’s poor, companies whose products are actually useful should be able to do it, too.
(Here the article discusses the path such companies need to take to get those products developed at a low cost)
The trick is balancing affordability and quality. In a Harvard Business Review article last year, Govindarajan, together with Tuck colleague Chris Trimble and General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, wrote that people in emerging markets “are more than happy with high-tech solutions that deliver decent performance at an ultralow cost—a 50 percent solution at a 15 percent price.” That’s not a green light for lame products, though. As in any market, what’s being sold has to fill an unmet need. The poor may be poor, but they’re not stupid.
Contributing editor David Wolman (david@david-wolman.com) wrote about diploma mills in issue 18.01.
*Correction appended Sept. 23, 2010 at 2 pm. D.light has sold more than 250,000 lamps, not 20,000 as previously reported.
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