Earth Equity News

Fertile Ground for World-Changing Ideas. By Robert Katz, Worldchanging.com, July 25, 2008. "The International Development Design Summit is a two-week [affair] organized by MIT's appropriate design guru, Amy Smith. A MacArthur Genius Award winner, Smith is renowned for her passionate, down-to-earth approach to design for base of the pyramid [BOP] markets... The goal... is to develop simple, inexpensive devices that can be produced locally and make a real difference for people and communities... Participants convened... for a day of business planning led by Paul Hudnut... of Envirofit, the Global Social & Sustainable Enterprise program at Colorado State University... and [creator of]... What's a BOPreneur?... Paul suggests... that business models and business thinking [must be] designed into the product... [to] help these appropriate technologies grow into viable companies. In the case of Envirofit's 2-stroke engine retrofit kit, [which is designed to address the pollution in Southeast Asia caused by carbureted two-stroke engines], the buyer begins to make money the day it is installed... Case in point... may be Suprio Das... [who] works with cycle rickshaw drivers in... Calcutta. Most... are very poor, and don't have access to electricity. Suprio's innovation is deceptively simple: he attaches a generator to the rickshaw's gearshaft, which pumps current into an on-board battery pack as the driver pedals around town. At the end of the day, the driver returns home and plugs the batteries into an LED light... giving the driver's family... electricity they would not otherwise have. His is a simple, appropriate design with a lot of potential. But Suprio had not thought about his innovation in business terms -- until yesterday... The collaborative environment fostered by Amy - featuring... [the likes of] Paul Hudnut, Paul Polak, SELCO's Harish Hande and others -- is a fertile ground for the design, development and dissemination of world changing ideas."