Communications as Innovation in Social Enterprise

WITH THE MERGER OF SOCIAL MEDIA and communication and the speed at which social networks are building out around the world, only one thing is certain: a vital part of daily life is changing fundamentally all over the world, including how innovative ideas spread.

What does that mean for our ability to identify, nourish, finance, replicate and scale up new ideas to meet human needs “smarter, better, faster and differently”? For instance, how can we ensure that social entrepreneurs in rural Indonesia have the biggest possible impact on the lives of people in Mexico, to pick two countries full of dynamic energy and important experience with poverty reduction? Promoting such direct “South-South” knowledge exchange is increasingly valued, but how can it become a reality?

Previously development organizations or civil society groups would have served as intermediaries to identify creative approaches to social enterprise. After that, the news would have been passed through personal contacts, presentations, conferences and even a case study. Eventually the core ideas from Indonesia might have made their way into policy and implementation in Mexico.

A World of possibilities

Today, we can all see completely new possibilities springing up all around us as individuals and organizations are sharing ideas directly with others, and finding them instantly when needed. Both Indonesia and Mexico have 1% of their large populations using Facebook, for instance. In a single year, Indonesia went from 2 million to 21 million Facebook users, a growth rate of 800%, making it the third largest Facebook nation. Mexico has nearly 10 million users, with 300% growth last year. Many more are joining as we write.

Not only can an idea in Indonesia or Mexico be spotted through a search engine query, it can also surface on platforms where groups of people with similar needs are self-organizing every day. And they can read about it in the language they prefer. Someone with an idea in Bahasa Indonesian can—right now—use Google Translate to post that idea in Spanish or English on Facebook, just as someone in Mexico can do the same into English or even Indonesian—without a development worker as intermediary.

As Clay Shirky says in his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, “The ability of people to share, cooperate and act together is being improved dramatically by our social tools.” He warns, though, that taking advantage of these opportunities will require a significant amount of “unlearning”—that “when a real, once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad….”

All around us people are texting, blogging, tweeting, uploading, downloading, crowd-sourcing, wiki-ing, linking in, georeferencing, i-chatting, skyping, flipping, videotaping, and more. Tomorrow, the range of possibilities will be even greater.

Social networking in poor countries climbing

Social networking is emphatically not a phenomenon confined to Americans or Europeans. Africa, long regarded as
the toughest test for Internet usage, has already seen dramatic increases in popular use in both urban and rural areas.
Experts such as Russell Southwood of Balancing Act predict that the decade ahead will see usage soar as the benefits of an estimated US $50 billion of investment in network infrastructure kick in. As mobile and internet capacity is built out and converges, not only are more people taking advantage of it but they are demanding local content. Vernacular language websites and broadcasting, including new formats such as radio via internet and mobile are increasing, making the new communication mediums available to larger numbers of Africans without Western education or language skills.

Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia already number among the top 10 websites used by Nigerians. YouTube is a top 10
website in all African countries surveyed. In Kenya, considered a bellwether, 85% of Internet users participate in some
form of social networking. “People kept telling me that kids were using Facebook in cafes in rural Kenya, and I didn’t
believe it—until I saw it for myself,” said Southwood.

Faster than most of us can adjust, the tools for social dialogue and interactive communication are becoming available
to almost everyone in the world through this new generation of social tools fueled by plunging economies of scale of ever more powerful technology. The ease, cost and reach has changed radically in the past five years; picturing what the next fiveyears will bring not just in technology but changing behavior calls for great imagination. Think back five years ago —did you foresee the rapid acceleration of Facebook, Twitter, or Skype?

Social media creates ecosystems for innovators

So how should innovators think about social media specifically related to the flow of new ideas around the world? For our part, we see it as the creation of “social ecosystems” that support, superbly, the processes essential to successful innovation. These include the functions of idea-sharing, scanning, broadcasting, replicating, and scaling through new forms of financing. These new ecosystems are, in essence, superpowered and supercharged by their speed of transmission combined with a fluid exchange of ideas across multiple media forms and a variety of channels and the inclusion of voices not limited by language or location.

Blogging and social network platforms with wide audiences and interactivity turn out to provide a much more productive
and efficient approach for idea-sharing than writing letters to the editor or even email. Wiki communities and other forms
of working “in the cloud” make collaboration infinitely easier for people working continents apart.

Increasingly, web-based competitions allow global scanning for new solutions. These can take the form of competitive
markets (Innov-Centives) or collaborative communities (Ashoka’s Changemakers). The combination of Internet penetration and a new generation of software tools that makes it practical to run global competitions is giving exponential reach and impact to innovation prize-giving. “It took me eighteen months to develop my initial product from conception to functional prototype. With InnoCentive and my second product, the research to sketch to engineering drawings to prototype took two months,” says Mark Bent, CEO of Sunnight Solar. In both arenas, crowd-sourcing is increasingly used to surface and rven select the most interesting new proposals.

Interesting experiences are being broadcast directly, easily and inexpensively. Informal, video creation and distribution via YouTube and Facebook is providing vast new potential audiences for entrepreneurs. Examples of this can be viewed in the 44 youth entrepreneurs in the April 2010 Latin American Development Marketplace or the 150 videos posted in one week geaturing finalists of the November 2009 Global Development Marketplace competition on climate adaptation. Many thousands more are instantly available on YouTube, Ning platforms, and many more.

Financing, the hardest hurdle that any small entrepreneur has to jump, has also experienced its own reinvention. With
the personalization of microfinance via the Internet, private individuals are making small loans to individual entrepreneurs
halfway across the world. As of 2009, Kiva has facilitated over $128 million in loans to 300,000 entrepreneurs globally,
82% of which were made to women. Since 2002, GlobalGiving has helped over 100,000 donors donate $28 million to 2,620 projects. This and other new flows of financing are just beginning to evolve.

Translation engines will now spread ideas globally

Despite the perils of prediction in such a fast moving situation, we see one major, transformative development that
is imminent: the emergence of multilingual social networking as a seamless part of daily life. Moving from language to language is about to become close to ordinary. This could have a huge impact on innovation. Translation may supply, we argue, one of the missing keys to the international replication of ideas—the grease that will help them flow more quickly from region to region.

Too often development organizations, philanthropies or the private sector have not translated their content into multiple
languages, and in so doing, have limited themselves to interacting with people who speak dominant languages such
as English. Most people using the web—about 72 percent—speak a first language other than English. Asia accounts for 36 percent of global web usage, Europe for 28 percent and North America less than 22 percent.

Today Google Translate handles 52 languages and is used hundreds of millions of times each week. Global Voice’s Linqua volunteers now translate in 17 languages, with 12 more in testmode. As the quality of machine and volunteer capabilities improves, translation is moving rapidly from a time-consuming, expensive, difficult process to one that is timely, affordable and routine. Not just multi-media but multi-lingual formats are about to become standard operating procedure for on-line dialogue and for social enterprise organizations.

This may be one reason why Joichi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons, argues that ideas don’t scale, they “spread” and
that worthy ideas go viral. In the new age of translation ahead of us, ideas will spread wider and faster than ever before.

Never a better time

In the time it took us to write this article, more than 4 billion pieces of content has been shared on Facebook, more and more of it in the developing world.

The almost imperceptible merging of communication and social media has moved both to the center of the innovation
agenda. Behavior is changing all over the world. These changes are spilling out in all directions. For those who seek to
encourage the timely creation and spread of innovative solutions in development and increase their impact, there has
never been a better time.

More than ever before, incremental increases in the use of communication will yield exponential returns in audience,
dialogue and impact. To do this, we need to be creative and forward-leaning, and to focus relentlessly on ways to connect
non-traditional audiences. If we truly care about scaling up innovative solutions, we should scale up and invest in all
aspects of these new social ecosystems. This is a moment to think boldly and use to the maximum the incredible range of communication media and tools now at our fingertips.

After all, everyone else is.
 

Edith R. Wilson is Advisor in the Innovation Practice of the World Bank Institute and blogs for Development Marketplace.

Richard Murby, a consultant based in Washington DC, is a technologist who has spread his time between internet start-ups and international organizations.

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The almost imperceptible merging of communication and social media has moved both to the center of the innovation agenda.