Innovation for Poverty Alleviation: Time to Change the Process?

Posted on 20 February 2012

By Sara Nadel
This post was originally published on the Harvard Business School’s Managing Innovation Blog

Several years ago, I saw a presentation by Yale School of Management Economics Professor Mushfiq Mobarak about encouraging poor populations in Bangladesh to adopt clean stoves. Traditional stoves pollute air inside the home, causing respiratory illnesses and increasing cancer risk. However, households refused to adopt the stoves. Dr. Mobarak suggested several reasons households may choose against using a product that is good for them: perhaps the male household head makes all purchasing decisions, but he is least affected by polluted air and thus miscalculates the benefits of the purchase. Perhaps the health returns of the clean stoves appear too far into the future for households to value the product at its price today. Or perhaps the taste of food from the clean stoves was different – worse – than the taste of food cooked on traditional stoves.

If economic theory describes the first two reasons households did not purchase these stoves, the third reason, taste, seems to be a clear design flaw. Why was an economics professor conducting research to encourage households to use a product they simply did not like? Should the product not be redesigned to produce tastier food?

In fact, the problem that useful and important products fail to capture the attention of target audiences is not uncommon in international development. Economic theory can often explain, and eventually resolve, the unpopularity of these products. But development practitioners often find themselves pushing a product that nobody wants to use. This is not laziness on the part of designers for development. Rather, I would argue that successful innovation methods and the practice of international development are uniquely incompatible.

Successful innovation is the union of a vast and uninhibited universe of solutions with identifiable goals. Ideally, these two bodies of knowledge – the goal and the methods – reside in the same population. The iPod derived from Apple engineers’ passion for music and frustration with available portable music players. These engineers may not have known ahead of time that they sought a small rectangular device with a round control pad, but when they hit on it, they knew they had what they wanted.

This ideal union is perhaps rare. InnoCentive understands that people or firms who know what they want may not have the technical knowledge to design it and has built a successful business around connecting these two populations. Yet the InnoCentive model fails when users cannot accurately identify their need. Steve Jobs’ statement that it is not the consumers’ job to know what they want works for a company like Apple, whose designers are also its users, but presents a challenge to those designers working for a population to which they don’t belong.

Communication between users and developers becomes particularly disconnected in international development, where policy and social programs originate from engineers and economists who are quite different from the populations they aim to serve, regardless of how much time they have spent living (even growing among) with their target users. When the objective is to develop a clean stove for poor households in Bangladesh, engineers focus on making that stove affordable to poor populations and functional in difficult weather conditions and low-tech societies. It is easy to understand how the question of taste could be overlooked.

More difficult to understand is why, once identified, resolving the issue of taste fell to a behavioral invention rather than to the product-development team. Presumably going back to the drawing table was too expensive for developers of a social product with limited budget. Dr. Mobarak’s paper ultimately concludes that his behavioral interventions can influence short-term take-up of the clean stoves in question, but not long-term use. Perhaps innovation-for-development methods need some innovating of their own.

UPDATE (February 20): Rema Hanna presented ongoing research about an implementation of clean stoves in India that had similar take-up problems at the Harvard Kennedy School last week. Her research, joint with Esther Duflo and Michael Greenstone of MIT, concludes similarly that this is a design problem. The paper is not yet released, but any updates will be posted here.

Sara Nadel is a Doctoral Student in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Hauser Center Doctoral Fellow for the 2011-2012 and 2010-2011 years. Prior to coming to Harvard, she was the Peru Country Director for Innovations for Poverty Action, an organization dedicated to rigorous research about development programs. Sara holds a BA in International Relations from Stanford University, and an MPA in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School.