How can you translate the unpredictable, abstract and complex attributes of a innovation process into tools and guidelines, in such a way that entrepreneurs in emerging markets can use them to create new products and services?
Over the past months STBY worked with the Inclusive Business Accelerator on a toolkit for Inclusive Innovation in Base of the Pyramid markets. The Inclusive Business Accelerator (IBA) is a partnership between several NGOs, such as BoPInc, SNV and VC4Africa.
There is no recipe for innovation, but there are certain ingredients that can help make your activities more effective. The Inclusive Innovation toolkit captures the experience, insights and methods of practitioners in emerging markets. It contains tools for market assessment, human centered design, rapid prototyping and crowd-funding, that can be used as ingredients for innovation processes. In addition it highlights real life case studies where the tools and principles have been applied, like in the development of biofuel briquettes (see image).
This toolkit forms the basis for the training of local business consultants who will support SMEs in Bottom of the Pyramid markets to innovate their business offering and operations. The toolkit will be launched and used in IBA trainings as of this spring.
In this project STBY had the pleasure to collaborate with a great team of professionals. Several partners from the IBA consortium brought in their expertise, in the form of proven and tested tools that had been adapted to the specific context. In other cases we co-created new tools from scratch, based on shared experience, and tips and tricks. The STBY team, including our associated editor Jim Boekbinder and design intern Ylja van Miltenburg, successfully took up the challenge to bring this all together into a comprehensive, visual and engaging result.