Regional
(2010-07-22)
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FORT COLLINS, CO
(KUNC) -
During the month of July, Colorado State University in Fort Collins is hosting 48 budding entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors from 17 countries. Their mission is to work on product inventions like cheap solar water heaters that are targeted to people living in the developing world.
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A Business Approach to Philanthropy
Being an inventor takes a lot of hard work, intelligence and a little bit of elbow grease.
Designer Nathan Cooke knows this well. He's standing in front of a small cramped classroom in CSU's College of Business.
Everyone in this classroom is part of the fourth annual International Development Design Summit. The idea is for people of different backgrounds and nationalities to translate new inventions into something that can improve life in the developing world. You might say it's a business approach to philanthropy. According to the DC-based World Resources Institute, it's a $5 trillion dollar market that's largely untapped.
Stephen Gerrard is on one of nine teams, each representing a different invention. He's getting his PhD in chemical engineering at Cambridge University in England, and honing an invention called JustMilk along with three other teammates. The product is a nipple shield nursing moms with HIV can use to prevent the virus's spread to their children.
"Our mission is not to make money out of HIV, it's to try to stop it from transmitting from mother to child," says Gerrard.
Gerrard sees the shield as an inexpensive product that could compliment or replace antiretroviral drugs. It's a great idea. But it's not going to be easy getting this product into the hands of women in sub-Saharran Africa--the group's target audience.
The Challenges of Innovation
CSU business professor Paul Hudnut is a host of this year's summit. He helped start Envirofit International, a company that partnered with the school's Engines and Energy Conversion Lab to create inexpensive, clean burning cook stoves.
"It really starts first with making sure you have a user or customer for your product or technology and you understand what the user or customer needs or wants," he says.
JustMilk has a ways to go before it can begin testing prototypes with nursing HIV moms. But a low-cost solar water heater project is further along .
Across campus, Miguel Chaves works in a test lab with two teammates. He wants low-income households in his native Brazil to adapt his prototype of a cheap solar water heater. He says right now they're spending about 20 percent of their income on hot water alone.
"We have a prototype on my roof that works, not how you want, but it works," he says.
Chaves says he's considering quitting his full-time job to devote more time to testing the product in Brazil. But there are a few sticking points.
Teammate Kim Powe is a business student from Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Washington State. She says the group is grappling with a simple, but very important question: Who will they sell the product to?
"Is our final customer the actual user, or is the final customer an NGO?" she says.
Finding the Magical Combination
Get the wrong answer for questions like these and your invention won't go very far. It could even be detrimental to your customers. Professor Hudnut points to one product that received millions in funding from international development organizations. Called the PlayPump, it connected merry go rounds to water pumps.
"It was a clever technology, but no one went and asked the communities, do you want these pumps?" says Hudnut.
Years after workers installed pumps in hundreds of African villages, many had broken. People were left without a source of clean drinking water for months. Still, Hudnut says there are success stories. But most are smaller companies. There's no Microsoft or Google right now in this field.
"We haven't figured out that magical combination yet that goes to scale," he says. "But that's exactly what IDDS is about."
That's important because the larger a company is, the cheaper and more widespread its products can become. In Economics 101 you would call this Economies of Scale. At this summit, you'd probably call it hard work, luck and a really great invention. © Copyright 2012, KUNC
