Start-Up Myopia

In recent weeks, I’ve been caught in the upswing of operations and business development that I’ve grossly neglected everything else – e.g., producing content for this blog. Now that we have completed our main order for Jindal Southwest and await the beginning of that trial, production has slowed and I’ve had a chance stepped back to pause and recollect my scattered responsibilities.

When we started production in May, the new stream of operations workflow brought with it a whole host of challenges, which I won’t revisit. Amongst other challenges, setting up and running productions was like a black hole that consumed all my extra time and energy that sometimes could’ve been better spent elsewhere. For the first 2.5 weeks, I sat for whole days working with the women in the workshop, at the end of which was left little time for all the business development work. Even as the workshop became independent enough to run itself, there still remained the daily check-ins on progress, productivity, quality, etc. Between these daily interruptions and the frequent fire drills of supply shortages or unexpected employee absences, the long-term workplans simmered away on the back burner, overlooked.

I realized that the myopia that occurred during our heavy production phase was just one incidence of shortsightedness amongst many. Perhaps, one of the most difficult and unexpected challenges that I’ve faced in working with a start-up has been to remain focused on the bigger picture. I expected that business school and management consulting had trained me well enough to focus on the 10,000 ft. view, and yet it was so easy to get caught by the immediate concerns – daily production reports, last minute sales meetings, networking opportunities, etc. – that I never realized that my 10,000 ft. view was really a 10 ft. view. I realize in hindsight that the trap is easy to fall into because addressing immediate concerns gives a more tangible sense of productivity than working on something with a longer timeline. Everything that we did was in line with our general objectives of getting the business going, but I doubt that we structured and used our time wisely.

In the past few weeks, my partner and I finally had time sat down to talk about the company. There are things that we should’ve done at the very beginning – broad framework exercises – which could’ve better informed some of the decisions that we made. With more time on our hands, we’ve sat down to do a detailed stakeholders’ analysis. As we talked through the various customer segments and the purchase motivations, I realized how differently he and I perceived the buyers’ motivations, which explained a few of our major disagreements. In discussing our raw materials’ suppliers, I again discovered just how differently we could’ve managed our supply chain and avoided a number of our daily stress instigators. So many of the decisions that we disagreed upon simply stemmed from the different perspectives and understanding we had of the business.

The entire time that we were working on generating more sales and manufacturing for orders, we both thought that we had fixed upon the larger vision and were aligned in our understanding of the business. The first week that we started working together, we created a workplan with short and long term goals and sales targets – this was what we thought the big picture meant. But now I realize how myopic that was. The bigger picture discussion should’ve meant objectives and targets even broader than simply sales targets that would inform a framework for how we would make business decisions. For example, should we take on an order if we don’t have the production capacity for it or if in order to produce it we would have to hire men workers? The sales targets and goals we established for ourselves were tactical and are useless in the evaluation of the option. Especially since it turns out my partner and I had different understandings of the business, we should’ve established broader values for our business so that we knew what to prioritize when a decision presented us with a conflict of objectives.

Seeing the bigger picture is hard. Certainly harder in a dynamic, changing business scenario. It’s easier when you’re looking at it as a static business case in a classroom or consulting conference room. Constant reevaluation of your understanding of the business is a must. In a start-up, you can’t stop stepping back and making sure that you’re making decisions with a 10,000 ft. perspective, because it’s so easy to think that when you’re actually about 10 ft. from the ground. I’m sure that a month from now, I’ll be feeling myopic all over again.

July 14, 2010 | Tags: | View Comments

The Technology Gender Gap

Originally written for the Villgro Research Blog, I’m re-posting my article here. For those short on time and patience, I would recommend just reading the last two paragraphs on the need to address the technology gender gap.

Technology and innovation are two words that form a pillar of social enterprise – even social enterprise itself is still considered an innovation. Social enterprises seek to develop technologies with the underlying assumption that they will increase productivity or create opportunities for social economic advancement. Some technologies are simple like the treadle pump, and others are complex like solar lanterns, but all of them help the BoP and it’s this latter benefit that we invest in. As social entrepreneurs, we’re obsessed with measuring this benefit and finding new ways to scale the impact further – in short we want to know that everyone who can benefit from this technology is adopting it. All the aforementioned statements are frequently discussed, but what we don’t hear enough about is whether these successful innovations are reaching men and women equally or whether there is a gender gap to adoption of technologies.

The International Council for Research on Women recently published the report “Bridging the Gender Divide: How Technology can Advance Women Economically”, which focuses on understanding how technology for the BoP differs in its impact on men versus women and what measures can be taken to ensure more inclusion of women. Four main barriers to adoption were identified:

-          Lack of education and technology literacy: women are often excluded from opportunities to learn the new technology

-          Time poverty: domestic responsibilities leave limited disposable time for tech exploration

-          Social norms: women are often not in the habit of operating technology, or adoption would require women to enter a public arena (i.e., market) outside their customary comfort zone

-          Limited economic means: domestic finances are most often controlled by the men of the households, leaving women unable to make a purchase decision to adopt innovations

These barriers can be overcome when developers of the technology or the social enterprise promoting the innovations take efforts to address the root causes, starting with including women in the design process. ICRW gives an example of the the Upesi rural biomass stoves, which were designed with inputs from women and consequently were adopted. I find this point to be one of the strongest recommendations – it addresses a systemic concern that prevents women adoption. As long as technology continues to be designed by men, women adoption will be low, perpetuating social norms that continue to support the existing gender gap. Sometimes, the solution is as simple as making a technology like a cooking stove, a height that women can reach. ICRW also suggests that inclusion of women in the design process can help to overcome many of the technology literacy and social norm barriers.

Other recommendations are centered on customizing the last mile distribution to address the awareness training needs, purchasing financing, and distribution through channels catered to women. By providing financing or bringing the innovation directly to the women, rather than relying on market place distribution, women are enabled to make the adoption. It is only through active efforts of the social enterprise to convert women adopters that this is possible.

ICRW provides the example of Solar Dryers in Uganda, which were financed by a partner NGO, enabling women to dry fruits for commercial consumption. As in the Solar Dryer example, technologies which can either create income generating activities or increase the productivity of women can go a long ways to contributing to their economic advancement. In addition, ICRW cites that the indirect benefits of increased productivity can also reduce the barrier of time poverty.

Overall, what I find most compelling and the most important point to takeaway is the need to examine and reevaluate how we think about the potential impact of a technology on helping the BoP. Social enterprises need to be more conscientious of the gender gap in innovation adoption and need to be vigilant in their efforts to address this gap.

One particular example comes to my mind of an innovative successful business model, who could benefit from thinking about their social impact with respect to an adoption gender gap. VisionSpring, an organization recently partnered with Villgro, uses a high touch-point sales distribution model to bring low-cost reading glasses to the BoP across southeast India. VisionSpring’s customer demographics are heavily skewed towards men even though there are many women who attend the eyecamps and should be customers. There seem to be two primary reasons for the gender divide between VisionSpring’s customers. The first is that eyeglasses are perceived as aesthetically unappealing, which trumps the value of clear vision. The second is that women are less likely to have disposable income and the economic means to make the purchase. Both these reasons are problems that should be and can be addressed by the social enterprise. Awareness campaigns for the importance of proper reading glasses in the preservation of vision, not to mention the benefits of increased productivity, can be conducted to overcome what is essentially a misguided social norm that is a barrier to wearing glasses. Women can also be engaged in sourcing frames that are more aesthetically appealing. Finally, some form of partnership with a microfinance institution to finance the purchases is also possible to overcome the economic concern.

The point I want to emphasize is not how VisionSpring can work to increase its female customers, but rather that it needs to proactively think and evaluate the impact of its technology to identify how to overcome the gender gap. This is true across all social enterprises. Even though many social enterprises have introduced game changing technologies to the BoP, I think if we look closer, we would see a divide in the impact by gender. This gap is one that needs to be overcome if we truly want economic advancement for all of the BoP – of both women and men.

July 8, 2010 | Tags: , , , | View Comments

Policy: Rights the Poor Don’t Know They Have

I was surprised to find yesterday morning, my New York Times homepage featuring an article on the rural poor of Jharkhand (where I currently live) and the government legislation, which is supposed to provide them the means to justice. The article, “Right to Information Law is Lever for India’s Poor” , reports on  the legislation, Right to Information (RTI), passed by the Indian government five years ago to address some of the systemic bureaucratic corruption by allowing individual citizens to have the “right” to ask for information on government actions and decisions. The law is supposed to empower all citizens to challenge and expose a corrupt government, with the hopes that increased transparency will lead to reform. As the reporter points out this law has not led to a dramatic reformation of a corrupt system, instead benefits have been varied and come at a more individual level of successful appeals. Grassroots anecdotes are shared of Dalit (untouchable caste) women in rural villages in Jharkhand, who were helped by social activist groups to utilize the law to obtain their rightful state welfare provisions. These individual victories are a small torch of hope for how the poor may yet be able to overcome corruption.

From my perspective* the optimism of those who hail the RTI law as a panacea is over-exuberant and premature. The RTI law sounds good in theory, but implementation and execution is really where it falls short. In order for the RTI to effect change, the individuals of the population need to exercise their right, which first requires them to be aware that they have such a right, and within here, I believe the problem lies. The success of the RTI law is heavily dependent then on the dissemination of information to the public, which in turn depends on the state in question. In the better run states, such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the population is generally better educated and informed. However, in states like Jharkhand, where one side effect of the government’s dysfunction is a large uneducated poor population, the existence of RTI will remain unknown to a large majority of citizens. So then, what is the benefit of RTI to the poor who actually need it to counter their corrupt governments?

After reading the article, I conducted an informal survey of the women who work at our workshop to see if they were aware of the RTI law. None of them had ever heard about it. Not even the few girls who had finished school. If even the literate, urban population isn’t aware of RTI, then what hope is there that the illiterate, rural population is? Jharkhand has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the country.** In the last national census (2002), Jharkhand had an overall literacy of 59%, but female literacy was only 39%. With 60% of women getting any information other than through word of mouth channels, how is RTI supposed to make a dent in Jharkhand’s corrupt government? While the grassroots stories of social activists helping the one off woman to achieve some public justice is heartwarming, they don’t do enough to make RTI an effective law.

When I read the New York Times article, I had an immediate reaction against the optimistic hope and praise around this “landmark” legislation. On behalf of all the poor, particularly women, who have little access to information and are illiterate, I wanted better execution of the RTI legislation to empower them and give them access to justice. If RTI is actually meant to reform the system, there needs to be more awareness campaigns outside of conventional media devices, so that the poor who really need the legislation actually learn of it. Otherwise, it’s just another piece of legislation, good in theory, but whose benefits never reach the poor.

* And I feel obliged to add a disclaimer here that my perspective is limited

** A little more context around Jharkhand – as a state, it has only existed for the last decade, after separating itself from Bihar, another impoverished and “lawless” state. As a natural resource rich state of minerals, coal, and timber (Jharkhand itself means “Jungle Land”), Jharkhand is home to two of the country’s largest steel plants and a number of other large industrials. Logic would imply that a state with such resources and industries should be one of economic growth, not one where 44% of the population lives under the poverty line (compared to 26% for India overall according to Business Standard). The public government does little to reverse the scenario. The dilapidated road infrastructure, constant power failures, high level of civil unrest (Jharkhand harbors a large percentage of naxal rebels) are other signs of government inefficacy.

July 1, 2010 | Tags: , , | View Comments