It’s time to announce the next step of IDDS! In 2012, IDDS will be held for the first time in Brasil and also for the first time it will be organized by a local team.

In addition, IDDS Brasil will be the first to focus on urban communities. We will work closely with partner communities in the favelas of Sao Paulo.

Through the IDDS spirit of co-creation we are looking forward to developing people and technologies to improve the quality of life of people living in poverty. We will be working closely with the communities of Sao Paulo to identify the problems that will be tackled during the summit. In the spirit of empowerment, we hope to develop the notion that anyone can be innovative and develop technologies.

For the summit, we are looking for participants with different backgrounds. We look for students, professionals from various fields, people from low-income communities and from developed countries, we look for teachers, doctors, engineers. We look for people with or without formal education. We seek participants from Brazil and abroad. This way, we intended to create an environment of innovation to address problems of developing countries.

During the summit, each team will be responsible for creating a prototype or solution to specific problems identified by partner communities, and they will be exposed to a network of organizations, entrepreneurs and institutions to support their projects so that they may continue beyond the weeks of work during the summit.

In addition, during the summit, we will promote numerous opportunities for participants to share their experiences with the group and the community. Through public events we want to reach a large number of people who can attend open classes and lectures.

IDDS Brasil will be a model for the future. In 2013 there will be multiple locally organized IDDSes in other regions around the world.

We are working hard to make IDDS Brasil an incredible event that further grows and engages the IDDS community in the use of innovation as an instrument for social change.

To apply as an international participant for IDDS 2012 Brasil, click here: http://iddsummit.org/apply. The international application deadline is 12 February 2012. There will be a separate application for Brazilian applicants which will be available in March.

Teams have been busy testing assumptions and business model concepts this week as we all get ready for our second round of village visits. Ben channeled Paul Hudnut again and led us through the process of venture validation, which is very much about getting feedback and testing.

One way to evaluate our assumptions is by plotting the confidence in an assumption against the importance of this assumption to venture success. The first step to validating our venture is to figure what to test, and this matrix can be a useful tool to help us prioritize what to focus on, such as uncertain assumptions that are critical to our success. As Andy Hargadon from UC Davis suggested at IDDS 2010 in Colorado, we can think about what types of tests we would run for 50 cents, $5, $50 and $500. Starting with a simple test can help build our confidence and inform us as we think about running progressively bigger tests. We can continue running several tests in this manner until we have the information we need to get where we want.

Ben also went over how to evaluate opportunities by using the “3M’s”: market demand, margin analysis, and market structure and size. One of the things I enjoy most about these lectures is that the presenters always share stories that are interesting and real to help illustrate the concepts. For example, Ben told us about a company he knew that was losing money with each product they sold. They reminded themselves of the need to address this by taping money to each product as it was going out the door, driving home the point that their business would not last for long if they did not change something.

There have been a lot of discussions on what is an appropriate, fair and sustainable margin to take (especially in the microfinance industry right now), with margins defined as:

margin = (price – cost)/cost

Selling at lower margins to a larger amount of people is one strategy that is sometimes used in base of the pyramid markets. It is often difficult to find exact numbers on manufacturing and distribution costs at our early stage, so a rule of thumb we can use to do basic financial checks on margins is:

total cost including distribution = approximately 4 times material costs

Then Ben gave us some tips on how to get a sense of people’s willingness to pay for our product, which can also be difficult to determine but is very important for informing the business model. Methods include comparing our product with other available products, trying market tests with several prototypes to see what customers prefer, and talking to sellers as well as users, since sellers tend to interact with more people regarding a particular product and may have more experience with those types of transactions (ex: imagine how often you buy a car compared to how often a salesperson at a dealership sells a car). We participated in a small exercise to practice the concepts we learned today. The group split into two, with one half trying to determine what a Ghanaian woman would pay for a corn sheller and the other trying to estimate how much it would cost to make and distribute one corn sheller. Interestingly, our rough guesses had the corn shellers costing more than people may be willing to pay (3-6.4 Ghana Cedis compared to 1-2.5 Ghana Cedis), sparking an interesting conversation about how we could structure a business to sell corn shellers.

There was also a lot of work to be done on the product side! We needed our prototypes to be ready to take to the villages, so people could try them out and provide feedback and new ideas. Here are some photos following the journey of the farmers team and the biomass team, as they put together and tested their prototypes before the village visits:

Mmm...it's easy to go nuts over this easy peanut harvesting process!

And let there be light - from biomass!

The teams definitely had their hands full, but we still somehow found time for sharing – this is IDDS after all, and we care a lot about building a wonderfully open community of collaborating innovators. We had another round of participant presentations, which included stories from Mony of Cambodia, Sanjeev of India and Fabiano of Brazil. Juan Carlos shared a personal account of Guatemala, showing us the beauty and violence of his home country. He told us about his work in assistive technologies and about the incredible people who make and use them, such as his cousin. His cousin is an engineer who was robbed and left for dead when his attackers realized he recognized them, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Juan Carlos has since been working on wheelchairs together with people who use them. They have been able to improve the design of traditional wheelchairs to make them more robust and utilize ubiquitous bicycle parts so that the chairs can be manufactured and repaired locally. They have also worked on wheelchairs for different situations, such as playing sports, and they even made a set of wheels for an injured dog to be able to move independently.

Participant design reviews are another way for us to share our work and ideas, providing us with an opportunity to gve/receive feedback to help each other with projects outside of IDDS as well. Suprio hosted a design review of the automatic chlorine dispenser project in India to get some more advice on how to design for manufacturing. It was great to get to spend the last night together exchanging all these ideas before heading off to the villages!

Twi Word of the Day: nante yie (safe journey)