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The Best Way To Help Innovation Take Hold Is To Design A Co-optable Resource
When Greg van Kirk was finishing up his two-year Peace Corps stint in the small town of Nebaj, Guatemala, he had a simple idea that could have a major impact. By replacing the traditional campfires that families cooked on inside their homes with cookstoves, the lives of the people in the region could be immensely improved.
Yet although the benefits of cookstoves are well documented, getting people to adopt them is more difficult than it might seem. First, while cookstoves save money over time, there is an initial expense that, given the poverty in the region, is a significant barrier to adoption. Second, it asked people to alter centuries of tradition.
This is a problem that change agents of all stripes run into all the time. For change to truly take hold, people need to embrace it for their own reasons. That takes more than a good idea. To make change truly scale to impact, we can’t rely on slogans and incentives, people need to be empowered to co-opt it and make it their own.
The Problem Of Scale
“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have written and since that time thousands of mousetraps have been patented. Still, despite all that creative energy and all…
