Path to Innovation Success Is No Straight Line

Need drives innovation.  But even when the need is life-and-death, innovation often follows a path that is crooked and sometimes comes to a (temporary) dead end.  "Eureka" moments may prove to be just that -- momentary.

Consider the cooking stoves used by more than 2.4 billion poor people in developing countries.  The stoves -- fueled mostly by kerosene or biomass (e.g., wood, charcoal, dung) -- kill an estimated 1.5 million people annually because of indoor pollution that causes pneumonia and other diseases (photo from U.N. WHO report "Fuel for Life: Household Energy and Health").

There have been numerous attempts to develop a less dangerous stove, but success has been, at best, only marginal.  Innovative stoves often proved inferior to open fires in cooking local foods, and in other cases they actually turned out to be inefficient energy users.

The 30-year struggle by a group of altruistic American inventors/tinkerers, scientists, and other amateur and professional experts to design a stove that was safe, efficient, inexpensive, and met local cooking requirements and tastes across the globe is described in a fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine, "Hearth Surgery."  (The link requires a subscription; to read the abstract, go here.  Author Burkhard Bilger's blog is here.)

For all their altruism and expertise, not to mention innovation, the designers met setback after setback.  One big obstacle was getting international donor funding.  "For groups like the Gates Foundation and USAID, the metric is cost-effectiveness," said team member Jacob Moss.  "How many people are you going to save with a hundred million dollars?"

The donor community found the metrics for lives saved by vaccines to be more compelling.  So the stove designers started putting electronic sensors in the kitchens of households where they installed their products.  The computer-modeled data did what the coughing child, sadly, couldn't always do -- showed how open fires and traditional biomass stoves could be directly linked to deadly pulmonary diseases.  The modeling also recorded the huge amount of carbon that hundreds of millions of inefficient stoves was dumping into the atmosphere, making them a major contributor to global warming.

The designers also worked more closely with families in their kitchens during cooking to understand how the preparation of different food in different localities, regions, and countries put different demands on stoves.

Forced to return time and again to the drawing board, the "Stove Camp" designers think they've finally developed a stove that can produce approving smiles everywhere from donor boardrooms to the U.N.'s Climate Change Secretariat to kitchens in homes in developing countries like Guatemala, Ethiopia, and India.  If that happens, it'll be a stirring (albeit sobering) triumph of innovation.

Suggestions for would-be innovators in development, based on the experience of the Stove Camp group:

• Form networks and partnerships that will strengthen your product or service and financing possibilities.
• Monitor and evaluate project results as rigorously as feasible.
• Come up with a pitch that is animated with marketing savvy.
• Remember that you can't just "deliver" your product or service -- it has to be "acquired" (tip of the hat to capacity development consultant Thomas Theisohn).
• Don't give up.  Ever.