Disruptive Innovation

I must admit that I enjoy seeing the disruptive ripples that the Internet inflicts upon traditional business models.

The old models do their best to fight to survive. For example, New Jersey recently banned Tesla from selling its cars in the state, mainly so the state’s inefficient auto dealerships won’t have to compete with Tesla’s direct sales model.

New Jersey is the fifth state to ban Tesla sales so far. Two other states also severely restrict Tesla sales, and at least two more have pending legislation along these lines. Tesla stirred up a hornet’s nest of resistance.

I remember walking into a Borders bookstore a while back and thinking… This won’t be here much longer. Now it’s gone, killed by smarter, faster, bigger Internet models.

It’s easy to scoff when protectionist laws get passed and to ridicule the folly of such backwards thinking. But take a step back and notice what riles you up about this. Is it possible that it bugs you because you’re also holding back from inviting more disruptive innovation into your life?

Where are you being too traditional? Where in your life are you behaving like a stick in the mud? Where are you protecting what you have and clinging to outmoded attitudes?

Where will you be in five years? Why aren’t you there now? Why not get there in one year? Why so slow? What innovations are you still resisting that would get you there faster?

Are you totally pro-innovation in your own life? Are you surfing the waves of disruptive innovation with dexterity and a sense of adventure? Are you capitalizing on the opportunities of tomorrow effectively?

Or, like the anxious auto dealers, are you a little resistant to what’s coming up? Do you ever feel that change is happening too fast? Do you ever want to slow things down?

Maybe you know that your old models are dying and that you’ll eventually have no choice but to move on, just as the auto dealers already know this. But in the meantime, doesn’t it feel just a little safer to stay put for now? Change is scary and uncertain, isn’t it?

The key to flowing with innovation instead of resisting it is to make sure you aren’t attaching your sense of security to that which innovation can disrupt.

If you regard money as a power source, for instance, then anything that threatens your finances can throw you off balance. If your primary relationship becomes a power source, then anything that threatens it also threatens your ability to feel secure. This naturally gives rise to resistance to perceived threats.

In a world of change, it can be helpful to root your sense of security in something that isn’t so easily disrupted. You can’t feel certain about your finances. But you can feel certain about something more permanent and unchangeable.

My passion for personal growth and the principles I live by (Truth, Love, Power, Oneness, Authority, Courage, Intelligence) are timeless. They don’t change.

No matter how many twists and turns my life takes, I can feel stable and secure. Sure I get knocked off balance at times. I get surprised. Sometimes it takes me a while to adapt. But I always seem to land on my feet. Whatever happens I take it in stride.

This is because I don’t root my security in anything that can be threatened. I stretch the roots of my identity ever more deeply into that which is invulnerable.

Money is vulnerable. Curiosity is invulnerable.

A relationship is vulnerable. Love is invulnerable.

A job is vulnerable. Humor is invulnerable.

If I became too attached to the vulnerable items in my life, I’d feel more stressed and anxious. I’d worry about potential threats. I might become depressed after suffering a loss.

I do my best to remember that the vulnerable items in my life are temporary and that it would be unwise to become too attached to them. I can enjoy and appreciate them for now, but someday they’ll be gone. I own nothing in my life. Everything here is temporary.

Oddly, the less attachment I feel towards the vulnerable items, the easier it is to summon them into my reality and to enjoy them fully.

When I saw money as a power source, for instance, I couldn’t attract it. I couldn’t even hold onto what I had. I sank into debt — for years. Earning money was hard. Saving it was hard. Enjoying it wasn’t even part of my thinking; money was too precious and scarce to enjoy. Money was more about necessities like paying the rent and buying food.

When I adopted the attitude that money is just a tool for my growth, a learning aid, and a plaything, I enjoyed its presence in my life much more and didn’t feel personally threatened when my income fluctuated. This attitude allowed me to make decisions with a more playful and experimental attitude, such as dropping the Google Adsense ads from my website in 2008, even though they were bringing in $100K+ per year in passive income. I wanted to play with earning money in different ways and not become attached to ad revenue, which was becoming too easy. Being unattached to money makes me a lot happier too.

Instead of waiting for the world to inflict disruptive innovation upon you, why not beat it to the punch?

If you root your personal security in concepts and ideas that are invulnerable to disruptive change (because they’re infinitely adaptable), you can play with life at a whole new level. You can create your own disruptive changes, just for the fun and the experience.

One disruptive change I inflicted upon myself was to uncopyright my online content (articles, podcasts, videos, and social media updates) and to donate it to the public domain in 2010. This amounts to about 30 books worth of material that I created over a period of many years. Each new article I write, including this one, is automatically donated to the public domain. I don’t own it. I wouldn’t have done this if I attached my personal security or my business success to the ownership of intellectual property. I didn’t feel threatened by this action. Take it as a positive demonstration of how secure I feel.

Copyright ownership is already temporary. In the USA an author’s work remains copyrighted by default for the author’s lifetime plus 70 years. Why wait so long? If that’s going to happen anyway, wouldn’t it be more fun to see what ripples would have otherwise been created 70 years after your death and to be able to interact with them today? Let’s press fast forward and see how it goes.

When I’ve been experiencing too much of the same for a while, I like to inject some disruptive innovation to stir the pot a bit. Mix things up. Put a new challenge on my plate. Roll some new dice. Deal from a fresh deck.

When we go slow, it’s often due to fear. We fear that we won’t adapt well to life on the other side. But the other side is where all the fun and adventure — and growth — is to be enjoyed. And in any event, fearing the other side totally ruins our lives on the pre-shifted side, creating stress, worry, and resistance.

Experiencing the shift is better than fearing the shift. Think of how much fun it would be to work at an auto dealership that accepted Tesla’s direct sales model challenge head on by engaging their teams to creatively innovate right back. How about training salespeople to actually add value to a sale instead of using manipulative tactics to squeeze out extra money? How about test drives that involve more than just four right turns? How about some decent free coffee instead of Folger’s? And when I walk in the door, where’s my hug???

Those auto dealers are robbing themselves of some fabulous growth experiences. They could gift their employees with the benefits of working in an exciting, change-driven, innovative field. There’s certainly room for innovation in terms of customer service.

Resisting change is stressful. Embracing change, however, is just plain fun.

When we fear change, we slow down our growth. Tesla has a disruptive product and a disruptive business model for its industry. It’s not the first disruptive company, and it won’t be the last. This kind of change is good for us in the long run. It injects fresh energy into stale and stagnant industries. Dealing with change is what makes going to work each day fun and engaging.

Why are we still using combustion engines? Let’s move on. Collectively we already know how to be smarter than that.

Let’s not beat up those who appear to be putting up roadblocks to change. That won’t solve anything. Let’s instead look to ourselves and observe our own blocks.

Where are you resisting change? Where are you moving too slowly? Where are you clinging to outmoded rules and behaviors? What innovations are you pushing away?

Could you speed up? Could you stop resisting? Could you start moving more quickly along the path that you’ll eventually take anyway? Why make it take five years? You could do it this year. You know that. Going faster would be a lot more fun, wouldn’t it?

Look first to yourself. Align your sense of self with invulnerable concepts to make it easier to welcome disruptive innovation, and you’ll inject that attitude more fully into the world. And soon you’ll be driving a car without an archaic combustion engine… except that you won’t actually be driving. The car will be driving you.

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TEDWeekends talks innovation for the Global South

Global Issues

Malaria kills about 2,000 people every day. The mosquito-borne disease has ravaged the equatorial areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, where a combination of poverty and climate make a dangerous breeding ground for disease. There is currently no vaccine.

But Nathan Myhrvold has a solution. In his talk and demonstration from TED2010,  Myhrvold offers a silver bullet to prevent malaria in Africa — a mosquito laser zapper. His lab has developed a laser beam that can detect whether a mosquito might be malarial, and then zap it mid-air. This exciting innovation shows much promise in the fight to prevent malaria.

This week’s edition of TED Weekends on The Huffington Post explores the risks and rewards of innovating high-tech solutions for the Global South. In addition to an article from Myhrvold providing updates on his work, HuffPo features two other essays discussing tech innovations in the Global South. Below, some highlights from these pieces to pique your interest.

Nathan Myhrvold: Striking Down Malaria … With A Laser?

So, to the critics who say we’ll fail, I offer this: You’re absolutely right. But that’s part of being an inventor. What’s more important is that we learn, keep trying and make sure our successful inventions have a meaningful impact. At worst, we’ll get people thinking about important problems in new ways. At best, we’ll invent technology that transforms life for the people who need it most and, in the process, inspire more technology companies to work their magic for the developing world. Either way, I’d consider that a success. Read the full essay »

Larry Hollon Rev. Larry Hollon: The Astounding Impact of Innovative Technology in the Developing World

Even technology that’s far more accessible than what Myhrvold describes is changing the game in Africa — not only aiding in the fight against malaria, but opening a whole new world. Mobile technologies make it possible to have access to information that is transformative, whether it’s tracking disease outbreaks or educating children. Read the full essay »

Stuart Rennie: The Less ‘Glamorous’ Side of Invention

For decades, public health professionals have warned against ‘magic bullet’ approaches to disease control. Developing a technological innovation (be it a drug, device or a machine) is generally not enough in itself to make a significant impact on a disease on a population level. This is painfully evident in developing countries, whose citizens often do not have access to medical inventions (like antibiotics or MRIs) that were developed decades ago and currently standard of care in more affluent settings. In order to effect real change, you need more than inventors: You need implementers. Read the full essay »

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9 talks about innovation in India

Arunachalam Muruganantham may not seem like the most obvious person to have started a revolution in sanitary napkins — after all, he is male. But in this funny and uplifting talk, given at the TED Talent Search in Bangalore, Muruganantham describes how he is enabling women in India to make their own pads — all as a gift for his wife, Shanti.

“What you did in your early marriage days — you tried to impress your wife. I did the same,” says Muruganantham in this talk, describing how he one day noticed his wife carrying something behind her back. “It was a nasty rag cloth — I don’t even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler.”

It was a moment when Muruganantham realized that his wife had to choose between buying feminine hygiene products and buying milk. And it launched a powerful idea — that making pads would be far more cost-effective then buying them. The problem: when his wife and sisters refused to test his creations, he had to devise a system to try them out for himself.

“That [experience] made me bow down to any woman in front of me and give full respect,” says Muruganantham. “Those five days, I will never forget — lousy days.”

To find out how Muruganantham created a machine that lets anyone make their own high-quality cotton pads — and why he decided to open source the blueprints — watch his talk. It’s a good reminder that innovation doesn’t just flow from developed nations to developing ones, but that amazing ideas can travel in both directions. After the jump, watch several more talks about innovation in India and how new solutions can be created if the resources of the community are taken into account.

Vinay Venkatraman: “Technology crafts” for the digitally underserved
Vinay Venkatraman is not your traditional designer. He has created a digital projector for a school out of a mobile phone, a lunchbox and a flashlight, as well as medical triage monitor from an alarm clock and computer mouse. In this talk from TEDxSummit, Venkatraman explains his idea of “technology crafts,” which use widely available parts to approximate technologies not affordable in rural India.

Anil Gupta: India’s hidden hotbeds of invention
“People may be economically poor, but they are not poor in the mind,” says Anil Gupta of the population in India. “The minds on the margin are not marginal minds.” In this talk from TEDIndia 2009, Gupta shares his work supporting entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas that are unable to flourish because of poverty. Gupta’s Honey Bee Network helps unsung inventors build the connections they need to market their products — from a coffee machine made out of a pressure cooker to a non-stick hot plate crafted from clay.

Jane Chen: A warm embrace that saves lives
Premature babies are unable to stay warm. While these babies are kept in incubators in Western hospitals, far too many babies in rural and poor areas die without a chance. On a trip to India, TED Fellow Jane Chen found herself deeply upset by this phenomenon — and determined to create a solution. In this talk from TEDIndia 2009, Chen shares Embrace, a low-cost portable incubator that looks like a tiny sleeping bag … and that could save a million lives.

Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement
Bunker Roy has founded a very unusual college Rajasthan, India: Barefoot College, a university for the poor. Roy’s school takes rural men and women — many of them illiterate — and teaches them to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors. From there, they bring their knowledge back to their villages.

Nirmalya Kumar: India’s invisible innovation
India has become a hub for software development — and yet this innovation is rendered invisible because so many believe that innovation doesn’t happen in the country. At TEDxLondonBusinessSchool, Nirmalya Kumar seeks to peel back these erroneous beliefs and show what is happening underneath.

Marc Koska: 1.3m reasons to re-invent the syringe
In underfunded clinics in India — as well as in other parts of the world — syringes are routinely reused. This practice kills 1.3 million people each year. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2009, Marc Koska introduces a promising solution: low-cost syringes that can only be used once.

Nandan Nilekani’s ideas for India’s future
Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani is often credited with making India a leader in IT services. In this talk from TED2009, he outlines what has helped India develop quickly in recent years — for example, a willingness to see people as a resource rather than a burden — and what needs to happen for economic growth to continue.

Anupam Mishra: The ancient ingenuity of water harvesting
The Golden Desert receives the least rainfall in all of India and, yet, centuries ago the local people devised an ingenious solution for harvesting water. In this talk from TED2009, Anupam shares how these feats of engineering are still used today — and may even be superior to our modern methods.

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Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change: Brené Brown at TED2012

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Brené Brown is an expert on vulnerability who starts off her talk by describing the extraordinary impact of giving a talk in 2010 at TEDxHouston: The Power of Vulnerability. For starters, she says, the day after giving the talk, she woke up in a state of depression that she’d shared details of her own breakdown in front of 500 people, and freaking out about what might happen if, say, 1,000 people watched the video when it was uploaded on YouTube. So far, the talk has been seen by 3.2 million people. It’s been quite a ride. She finds herself being accosted by fans in local stores. She’ s been asked to speak all over the country. And while many of the invitations she’s received have asked her to focus on innovation, creativity and change but perhaps hold off on that vulnerability or shame stuff, Brown wants to talk about it. After all, she says, “vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”

Yet the experience also pointed out a harder truth to Brown; it helped her learn a difficult lesson about herself: “As much as I would be frustrated about not getting my work out into the world, there was a part of me trying very hard to engineer staying small,” she confesses. “I was staying right under the radar.” Post TEDx, that was no longer an option.

Brown has continued her work on vulnerability and she shares a few insights now. Firstly, that it is not a weakness. This, she says, is a profoundly dangerous and pervasive myth. Secondly, that in order to understand the relationship between vulnerability and courage, we need to talk about shame. Jungian analysts call shame the “swampland of soul,” a lyrical construct that helps illuminate why it’s important to spend time on the topic, hardly one most of us care to dwell on. But, she says, in order to have a compelling conversation around race, we need to talk about privilege, which is all wrapped up in shame. In order to have a compelling conversation around healthcare, we need to understand that surgeons’ self-worth is stitched up in being all-powerful. All-powerful people don’t need checklists or make mistakes. We need to recognize and understand deep-rooted shame at the heart of any broken system if we are ever to change it.

We also need to accept and embrace the concept of failure, not because failure is a good thing but because it’s a natural part of the path of progress. If you’re failing, at least that means you’re trying — not remaining on the outside of the arena, looking in. And we need to learn to deal with our inner critics, who are so adept at shutting us down when we dare to try.

“Shame is an epidemic in our culture,” she says. “To get out from underneath it, to find out a way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us, the way we parent, the way we look at each other.” We need to learn to understand what’s going on — and we need to hone our skills with shame’s antidote: empathy. For if the three factors that foster shame the fastest are secrecy, silence and judgment, it cannot survive being doused with empathy. “It can’t survive the two most powerful words to hear when we’re in struggle: ‘me too.’”

So while it might seem like a nice comfortable idea to stand outside the arena, to wait just a little bit longer, until we’re bulletproof or perfect, we need to accept that there’s no time like the present. “Even if you got as perfect as you could, when you got in there, that’s not what we want to see. We want you to go in, we want to be with you and across from you. We just want for ourselves and the people we care about and the people we work with to dare greatly.”

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High-velocity innovation: Fellows Friday with Jodie Wu

Jodie Wu’s Global Cycle Solutions creates bike-run machines mounted on rideable cycles, transforming bikes into mobile business tools for rural Tanzania.

How did you get interested in innovating solutions for problems in developing nations?

I first went to Tanzania as part of MIT’s D-Lab, a multidisciplinary course on development of appropriate technologies, innovation, and creative capacity-building to alleviate poverty. Among the principles taught is the concept of co-creation. Are you familiar with it? There was a phase in development where Westerners were saying, “Oh, if we just give people in developing nations tractors — i.e., technology that worked for us — it’ll be great.” What we didn’t realize was that we were dumping technology into a market where people had no idea how it worked. So now there’s lots of tractors all over, rusting. No spare parts are available because they were designed for the Western world. In contrast, co-creation is the concept of inventing new technologies alongside the people who will use it — having their input as well as ours. When two rivers meet, they meet at a confluence. Co-creation involves making confluent technologies: merging two ideas into one that’s better than either one on its own.

Did you go to Tanzania with an idea in mind, or did you go to identify a problem and come up with a solution?

We had to identify a problem before going, and build community partners, and then come up with the technology or solution that we thought would work. My project was a pedal-powered maize sheller. I actually started with a design from Guatemala, which had been used for the past 20 years. I didn’t invent this technology, but adapted it so it could be packed into a suitcase and moved more easily. But when I got to Tanzania, I saw that the technology was still completely inadequate — expensive, bulky. Why would a smallholder farmer want to own this machine? If he has two acres, he’ll have finished everything he needs to do with it after two days. Alternatively, who would want to lug their maize from place to place to get it shelled?

So we turned the idea on its head. I thought, “Let’s plug the machine into a bicycle — and also use the bicycle as a platform to bring the technology to the people.” So now the technology is shared among the community: it can be biked from place to place. Then when it’s out of season, a new machine can be plugged in, leveraging the bicycle as a tool of empowerment in itself.

At first, we rode the bicycle shellers out to the farms to shell maize. But then people started renting the bike shellers themselves, and some began offering it to others as a service, giving rise to an entrepreneurial model.

Using the bike-mounted maize-sheller. Photo: Global Cycle Solutions

How does the bicycle sheller fulfill a need?

The bike sheller serves as a bridge technology. There are actually two extremes in maize shelling technology. Most people beat maize with a stick, or use their fingers. The “high tech” alternative is a large tractor which travels to villages offering to shell maize for 1,000 shillings, equivalent to 60 cents, for every sack filled. But tractor companies don’t want to visit small-holder farmers: they want to go someplace where they can shell 500 sacks of maize, not just 10 or 15. A bike-shelling entrepreneur can shell one sack of maize in 40 minutes, giving him the potential to earn $10 per day.

We think the ideal model would be that one person in the village buys the bicycle, becomes an entrepreneur and shells the maize for the rest of the village. Right now we’re working with village chairmen who would select a youth to be the one to provide the service to the whole village. So it’s his job, and he gets money from each of the villagers. That way, everybody benefits. During the maize harvest, he can use the sheller. During the off season, he can still make a living as a bicycle taxi, for example.

We’ve also developed other technologies to accommodate those who don’t want to be entrepreneurs, but just need useful technology. For instance, it’s not appropriate or comfortable for some people, like grandmothers or little kids, to use a bike sheller. For them, we developed a tiny $2 hand-sheller, which allows them to shell while protecting their fingers.

What else you can do with the bike?

We’re still developing more tools that can be plugged into a bike, but the one closest to being finished is a maize grinder, which basically grinds maize into flour. Another attachment is a rice thresher. We have a bicycle phone charger as well, which charges your phone as you bike from place to place. The possibilities of things you can do with a bicycle are endless, which is why the concept of GCS is so exciting.

GCS’s bike-mounted phone charger. Photo: Global Cycle Solutions

What’s your ultimate goal, and when will you feel like you’ve succeeded?

The metric for success in terms of being sustainable as a company is getting sales and breaking even. But for me, it’s about getting the technology into the hands of people who need it. Even if I can get 1 percent penetration in Tanzania, which is still 40,000 farmers, I’d be delighted.

My grand vision is really to develop a portfolio of attachments and be able to achieve worldwide distribution. I want to break even in Tanzania after two years, and then to expand to Uganda, Kenya, and Zambia, and then to be able to travel.

We’re also expanding to the US market for our phone chargers, which were designed from spare bike parts by a 40-year-old Tanzanian inventor, Bernard Kiwia. He’s an amazing man who has made a pedal-powered drill press, pedal-powered hacksaw, a solar water heater out of fluorescent tubes. Selling in the United States would help us bring in revenue faster so we can expand faster elsewhere. And I want to celebrate Bernard’s story, not just to bolster him, but also to publicize our company to a wider audience and make people aware of the technology gap.

Too often, you hear about sustainable development projects that get started, and then the leaders leave and the project dies. I’d like this project to survive beyond my lifetime.

Making sure your project will carry on would require a lot of education and training.

Exactly, and that’s what we’re doing right now. We’ve realized customers need a lot of support, so we’ve trained technicians throughout the country to offer help if anyone has trouble assembling the machine. We’re also working on building relationships, interacting with all the chairmen who have maize farmers in their villages, and letting them know about the product. Last year we didn’t sell very many, but this year sales are suddenly exploding. It’s simply because we’re going into the villages and making personal contact.

What do they make of you, a young Asian-American woman trying to sell them this gadget?

Most of the time, my sales reps, who are Tanzanian, do the community contact, but I encourage my Western colleagues to integrate into local culture as much as possible, living as Tanzanians do. When I visit villages, I do think they’re always shocked and don’t know what to think of me. I actually have become quite fluent in Swahili, so that excites people. Attitudes towards foreigners can be tricky. People can be either excited and honored at your presence, or they think you’re going to donate something, because that’s been the history of Africa in general. Then we have to explain that it’s a business, which can be hard. It kind of helps that I’m Asian, because they don’t know how to perceive me at all. I’m not quite the typical European or American.

Tools of the trade. Photo: Global Cycle Solutions

What’s the best part of what you do?

I love showing people how bicycles are really tools for empowerment. You can build a full business around a bicycle. You don’t even need a house. Just get a business card, your bicycle, your machine, your phone charger, and your phone — those are all the elements you need to start your own business. So I hope it takes off, but I think the biggest thing is just making sure the technology is accessible. I think a big failure right now in sustainable development initiatives is that there are a lot of technologies being developed at the university level, but they never go anywhere. No matter how good your innovation, if you don’t take it to the people that need it, it won’t have any impact.

What’s it been like to be a TED Fellow?

My favorite part about being a TED Fellow is meeting all the other Fellows. They are all amazing, passionate people, and it was incredible to spend time with all of them. The Senior Fellows were great advisers in preparing us for the TED conference and how to make the most of it, and the Fellows staff are extremely entertaining and supportive. I’m really glad we all got to take the main stage and learn how to give a TED talk. Hopefully, it will come in handy later in life!

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?

Follow your passion and just dive in to start your company. You may not know what you’re doing, but for sure, you’ll learn and grow. That is, if you have the right attitude! Me, I have no regrets.

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