Building Blocks of Innovation

This post is contributed by Villgro Fellow, Jeanne Chen.

A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) featured an article: “The Origins of Good Ideas” discussing how many successful innovations aren’t revolutionary, but rather built on existing products. The premise: Existing Products + New Idea + Modified Application = Innovation. The corollary is that new ideas result from cross-industrial applications – the article gives the example of using a motorcycle battery to power an infant warmer. This example and conclusion should be familiar to those in India’s social enterprise sector, where adapting motorvehicle batteries has created a reliable source of power in rural districts. What’s critical to note from the article’s examples is how innovation often arises from sharing ideas across industries, which highlights the importance of bringing ideas together to facilitate innovative adaptations.

In my opinion, this facilitation of idea sharing is one of the more valuable and intangible differentiators of social incubators like Villgro. Bringing together innovations from multiple disciplines, incubators can furnish a fertile environment for new ideas to develop. While incubators can actively facilitate cross-pollination of ideas as part of a recommended course of action, many times the facilitation is passive simply by creating a network of innovators. For example, Villgro’s annual Unconvention social entrepreneurship conference hosts InnoHub, specifically for nurturing partnerships between innovators and entrepreneurs. The exhibition brings together Villgro’s network and creates opportunities for meetings and discussions, which can lead to an alternative application of an innovation resulting in meaningful social impact. In the larger social sector, this is a significant way for Villgro to contribute to the further development of new innovations.

Villgro also hosts monthly Learning Saturday Workshops for its incubatees and staff. Each month’s sessions focus on different themes of best practices, sectoral knowledge, and general social development information with featured experts and guest speakers. These learning sessions have a tremendous potential to help teach incubatees to improve or adapt their technology as well as to encourage staff to look at existing ideas with a fresh eye. From innovative marketing to design, having specific events for the entrepreneurial community to exchange ideas and knowledge helps the sector to apply new ideas to existing systems.

The conclusion of the WSJ’s article, while not a surprise, is a good reminder to all of us that we can all encourage more innovation through the facilitation of platforms for idea exchanges. Social incubators, like Villgro, have a unique advantage in bringing together their entrepreneurial networks and actively creating opportunities for those networks to interact is an important part of their core functions.