FIVE

Democratizing Technology

CAN YOU PICTURE Mahatma Gandhi toting a video camera to expose human rights abuses, flying a jet plane to ship in relief supplies to devastated communities, or genetically engineering a crop plant to provide more nutritious foods for the hungry? Probably not, but for many social entrepreneurs, Gandhi has been a lifelong inspiration, their beacon and navigational reference point. Not only did he promote self-sufficiency with his goats and spinning wheels, but he also helped catalyze systemwide change. He shook the British Raj to its roots with his astonishing march to the sea to boil salt, evading the much-hated salt tax. Today, a growing number of social entrepreneurs carry his torch, but many do so using technologies he would have found incredible.

One Laptop per Child, the ambitious venture we profiled in chapter 4, embraces technology to create the markets of the future. We cannot rely on technical fixes to solve all our problems; sophisticated but low-tech approaches like those of Bunker Roy and Barefoot College offer powerful solutions to some of the most pressing market failures. But one key question will be whether, in the spirit of the open source approach to software, social entrepreneurs can democratize the development, deployment, and use of the new tools needed to build new, more equitable, and more sustainable forms of wealth creation.

Gandhi was no slave to technology—indeed, he was far from it— but he would have appreciated the work of people like Ashok Khosla at Development Alternatives, based in Delhi, India. A Harvard doctorate in experimental physics seems an unlikely qualification for brick making, but when Khosla abandoned a promising scientific career to focus on issues of environment and development, he embarked on a mission to carry forward a key Gandhian concept: the democratization of knowledge. In the process, he has made massive contributions to the ability of ordinary Indians—and people of many other nationalities—to make the basic building blocks of civilized life.

In this chapter we briefly study four clusters of entrepreneurs whose ventures focus on the trends that will improve the future for a growing proportion of the burgeoning human population. In order of the sophistication of the underlying technologies, we group the technologies as follows:

• Basic building blocks, such as bricks, tiles, and water pumps
• Vehicles, particularly motorcycles and aircraft (or “wheels and wings”)
• Old and new media and the associated technologies
• Twenty-first-century tools of genetics and biotechnology

For each cluster we’ll describe the remarkable work of one or more of our unreasonable entrepreneurs—and explore some of the lessons they have learned in the process.

Basic Building Blocks

So great is the pace of evolution in this field, that it can be difficult to pick a representative sample—but in what follows we spotlight nine enterprises that illustrate some of the basic characteristics of how these entrepreneurs operate.

Ashok Khosla and Development Alternatives

Let’s begin with Ashok Khosla, who, like so many other social and environmental entrepreneurs, has made a difference in the diverse worlds of government, education, business, and the citizen sector. After helping design and teach Harvard’s first course on the environment, he set up and directed the environmental policy unit for the Indian government and later worked for the United Nations Environment Programme in Kenya. In 1983, he established the hybrid nonprofit and its spin-off social businesses with which his name is now most closely associated: Development Alternatives. Over the years, this extraordinary organization has turned out one new technology or method after another, simultaneously creating income for the poor and protecting or regenerating the environment.

Among Development Alternatives’ most notable successes have been machines that produce standardized and affordable products for rural markets, such as roofing systems, compressed earthen blocks, fired bricks, recycled paper, handloom textiles, cooking stoves, briquetting presses, and biomass-based electricity. To take just one example, the TARA micro concrete roof tile kit consists of a simple machine and related tools, providing employment for five people and affordable roof tiles for thousands. The environmental benefits? The TARA vertical shaft brick kiln cuts energy use by 55 percent and emissions by 50 percent, offering an officially approved replacement for traditional technologies now banned on environmental grounds.

Development Alternatives’ paper production units, meanwhile, employ forty workers to produce textured high-quality paper from rags and recycled paper. DESI Power, its electric utility, installs mini power stations in villages, fueled by weeds and agricultural waste. TARAhaat brings information technology to villages through its Internet portal, and its rapidly growing network of franchised local telecenters provides a range of information services—including educational courses, e-governance services, and Internet connectivity—to local people on a commercial basis.

All that is just the tip of the iceberg. The organization’s fuel-efficient, low-emission stoves are now widely used in Indian homes. Local groups and official agencies use Development Alternatives’ portable pollution-monitoring kits to test water and air quality in cities and towns across the country. Development Alternatives has also built more than 130 check dams to revive the water cycle of many microwatersheds. Khosla and his team estimate that, in total, the group has created more than half a million sustainable livelihoods across India.

The Development Alternatives story underscores how critical it is to fully understand the socioeconomic and environmental context in which the poor live. Khosla’s appreciation of that context allowed him to design and produce a spectrum of technologies that are useful, are affordable, and improve the lives of his clients. But what happens when others—including companies and public and nongovernmental organizations—drawn by the success of such innovations, try to replicate them in other contexts? Unfortunately, such efforts will likely fall short of producing the intended impact. In fact, one of the most common complaints heard in government and development agencies is the lack of transferability and scalability of innovative approaches spawned by social entrepreneurs working at the grassroots level.

We believe the fault lies less in the innovations and their lack of transferability and more in the cut-and-paste approach that intermediaries bring to such undertakings. Such agencies are ill equipped to spearhead local and global replication of grassroots innovation and development. Why? Because successful social innovators like Khosla (and Fisher and Moon from KickStart, profiled next), as well as many others, have spent decades designing, implementing, and refining demand-driven approaches to complex social and environmental problems. Their achievements have followed a continued process of trial and error. They know the stakeholders to involve, the signals to watch for, and the pitfalls to avoid. Fortunately, development organizations and governments are recognizing their limitations in this sphere, drawing on the accumulated knowledge of the Khoslas of this world. And the key factor behind Khoslas’s undeniable impact as a change maker, to use his own term, has been his laserlike focus on the social and environmental dimensions of value creation.

Nick Moon, Martin Fisher, and KickStart

Similar principles apply to the work of KickStart in East Africa, already mentioned in terms of its extraordinary impact on the economies of countries like Kenya (chapter 3). Time magazine named cofounders Nick Moon and Martin Fisher two of its Time Heroes in 2003.¹ Moon and Fisher had chosen a hybrid nonprofit model to identify profitable small-scale industries that can support thousands of local entrepreneurs and enable them to repay small capital investments in three to six months from start-up. KickStart also designs and markets appropriate technologies to help establish these new small businesses.

KickStart’s products must meet strict criteria: among other things, they must be affordable, manually operated, energy efficient, easy to transport by bicycle or bus, and durable. As if that were not enough of a challenge, they should require minimum training to install and use and be very easy to maintain and repair. The organization designs tools for mass production and trains local manufacturers in large-scale production techniques. It then buys the products from the manufacturers and markets them to poor entrepreneurs.

KickStart’s MoneyMaker foot-operated micro irrigation pumps have been identified as one of “ten inventions that will change the world” by Newsweek magazine.² So what does this mean in practice? To relate just one example, Samuel Ndungu Mburu, one of the poorest farmers in his valley in central Kenya, owned one acre of land and made only $100 a year from selling his meager crop. In desperation, he went to Nairobi to try to support his seven children. He tried selling roasted maize on the roadside but was constantly harassed by the local authorities and made too little to send home. Frustrated, he returned to his village, where he saw a Kick-Start MoneyMaker pump being sold at a local shop. He convinced the shop owner to take a down payment and let him pay the balance after his first harvest. He started growing high-value tomatoes and green beans and today rents and irrigates five acres of land, making over $1,600 profit per year. His oldest son, who has graduated from technical college, credits the MoneyMaker pump with changing his family’s life. Not only was Mburu able to pay this son’s college tuition and buy him a bike to get to class; but another son is now studying to be an electrician, and all the other children are in primary or secondary school.

Are Fisher and Moon concerned about others imitating their products? Quite the contrary, they insist. KickStart’s goal is to subsidize the development and establishment of new technologies until they become so firmly rooted in society that many other companies step up to compete. According to Fisher, “To date, over fiftytwo thousand families in Africa have escaped poverty by using our irrigation pumps and other technologies, but we have only scratched the surface. We are now working to scale our program to help many millions more.”³ Fisher and Moon are the first to acknowledge that success in meeting their wider goals will also depend on others’ replicating their endeavors.

Wheels and Wings

Even well-planned development efforts often stumble because organizations tend to overlook distribution, a crucial component. For example, bricks and foot-operated pumps generally don’t need to travel a great distance, but essential pharmaceuticals often come from far away. Food supplies, new drugs, vaccines, and other critical health products—including mosquito nets and condoms—are useless unless they reach their intended destination. So how can entrepreneurs get such items where they are most needed—that is, where market failures are the greatest?

That’s where two exemplary organizations—Riders for Health and Air Serv International—enter the picture.

Andrea and Barry Coleman and Riders for Health

If you want to drive change, it often makes sense to use—and adapt—the tools you know best. One stunning example is provided by Andrea and Barry Coleman of Riders for Health. After a life-changing experience in Africa, the Colemans woke up to the fact that while it takes only a few hours to reach any capital in the world by plane, it can take days and many hardships to reach developing countries’ more rural areas. Because the Colemans met through their common passion for motorcycle racing, the tools that were most readily in their hands were motorcycles.

The epiphany came when Andrea, herself a racer, and Barry, a journalist, accompanied motorcycle champion Randy Mamola on a trip to Somalia to visit a project he was sponsoring, an immunization day for children. They never reached the site—and the immunization day didn’t happen—because their cars broke down. Thus, they came face-to-face with an ever-present barrier to effective delivery of goods and services in rural Africa, where the majority of the continent’s population lives: a lack of know-how about vehicle maintenance and repair. The result, all too often, is that next-to-new motorcycles and four-wheel-drive vehicles sit in parking lots or at roadsides, left to rust and fall apart. It’s a waste of money and other resources. Worse, such problems seriously hamper progress in Africa by limiting the delivery of vital health services, including the drugs and diagnostics essential for disease prevention and eradication.

So, as a first step, the Colemans became active in fund-raising for Save the Children and started a vehicle management program for the NGO in the country of Lesotho. Then, in 1996, they decided to launch Riders for Health. The organization has shown that appropriate modern technology can perform without breakdowns even across the unforgiving terrain of rural Africa. Eventually, Riders managed to halve the cost of motorcycle transportation. Today, the organization estimates that with nine hundred bikes in operation, it reaches an astonishing 11 million people with regular, reliable health care.

By using the bikes, governmental and NGO workers involved with health-related aid and other kinds of help have increased their number of visits to remote communities by at least 300 percent. In one district in Zimbabwe, malaria death rates fell by 20 percent after health workers were equipped with motorcycles. The Colemans think that leaders in the public and private sectors can learn from their success. Their advice is this: “Understand how important the ‘greasy hands’ part of development is. Bikes, cars, and trucks are tools, not toys. When the rubber hits the road, they can be as vital as policy, microbiology, and microfinance.”⁴

As major companies become more involved in BOP markets, mainstream businesspeople become more interested in understanding what they can learn from Riders’ work—and, in several cases, how they can use aspects of Riders’ logistical network for their own ends. However Riders may help their business counterparts, they are pioneering some of the most important economic pathways of the new century.

Air Serv International

If there is one guarantee in the twenty-first century—alongside nagging systemic dysfunctions—it is natural or man-made disasters. An enterprise that illustrates the potential social value creation opportunities in disaster relief is Air Serv International. As some media outlets discovered during the tsunami crisis of 2004, Air Serv uses the latest technology—not motorcycles in this case, but aircraft (like the DeHavilland Dash 8, Turbine DC-3, and Antonov 32) and a wide range of helicopters. Founded in 1984 by a handful of pilots responding to the same famines that helped ignite Bob Geldof’s passion to tackle hunger and poverty, Air Serv has since provided over a hundred fifty thousand mercy flights for hundreds of relief and development agencies around the world. Working for (and largely funded by) UN agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and international and local humanitarian organizations, Air Serv collaborates closely with those agencies—in effect, serving the servers.

Using single- and twin-engine aircraft in dangerous, remote, or transportation-deficient areas and larger aircraft operations to airlift food and seed, Air Serv is resolutely nonprofit—although it’s not hard to imagine how profits could be made from some communities in distress. In some ways, the organization sits between models 1 and 2 in our typology. In the face of famine and flood, earthquake and war, the world’s leading relief and development agencies count on (and help fund) Air Serv’s unique capabilities to get their human and material cargo to those who need it. Yet the very conditions that create emergency situations often make flying a perilous task. Many of the Air Serv pilots and crew work for corporations or for airline companies but are willing to use their skills to serve the poorest of the poor, providing air transportation in some of the most dangerous and desperate situations, often at great personal risk. Indeed, sometimes fighting subsides only temporarily while an Air Serv plane swoops in to make an emergency delivery or evacuation. Often, runways are makeshift at best, navigation aids unreliable, weather conditions terrible, and alternative airports nonexistent.

“We fly where other air carriers cannot—or will not—fly,” declares the Air Serv motto, “making us in a very real way the only air carrier that can get relief workers from the world’s most respected humanitarian organizations where they need to go.”⁵ One key characteristic, as with organizations like the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières, is Air Serv’s absolute commitment to political neutrality. Its pilots and other volunteers are careful to remain nonpartisan: though many opposed the Iraq war, for example, they headed to Iraq to help soon after the conflict began.

“Our staunch adherence to remaining neutral in the face of conflict means we can fly to places where others may be restricted,” Air Serv explains on its Web site.⁶ “We are not affiliated with any government, church-based mission, corporation or other entity. As part of the first step of an emergency response, our passengers include relief assessors and doctors, nurses, water engineers and nutritionists from our fellow humanitarian organizations, including Save the Children, CARE, World Vision, Médecins Sans Frontières and many others, who must respond quickly to emergencies.” Moreover, “it is often said by our fellow humanitarian workers that they fly Air Serv or they don’t fly at all.”

Old and New Media

Everyday miracles like motorcycles and planes tend to be taken for granted in developed markets, but not in other parts of the world. In the same way, the media that inform and entertain us every day can seem almost otherworldly to those with no access to books, radios, computers, or tools like the video cameras that activists use to record—and, in some cases, redress—environmental and human rights abuses. Let’s look at what a number of entrepreneurs are doing in each of these areas.

John Wood and Room to Read

First, we’ll consider books. We have already covered First Book, which focuses on getting books to young Americans, so let’s begin here with a leveraged nonprofit organization (model 1) that does the same for youngsters in the developing world: Room to Read. The enterprise was founded on the beliefs that “World Change Starts with Educated Children” and that education is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty. The story began in 1998, when founder and CEO John Wood was “an overworked Microsoft executive looking for the quiet solitude of a trekking vacation.”⁷While he was backpacking in the Himalayas, Wood came across a middle-aged Nepalese man who invited him to visit a nearby village school. Jumping at the chance to see the real Nepal, rather than sticking to his tourist’s trek, Wood agreed—and the encounter changed his life.

The Nepalese man turned out to be an education resource officer. Wood duly discovered that despite the man’s best efforts—which involved crossing high mountain passes on foot to visit schools— he had few resources to offer the schools for which he was responsible. Wood, in short, came face-to-face with a harsh reality facing millions of Nepalese children: there were almost no books. He was shocked to discover that the few books the local school had—“a Danielle Steele romance, the Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia, and a few other backpacker castoffs”—were deemed so precious that they were locked up to protect them from the children.

As Wood left the village, the headmaster made a simple request: “Perhaps, Sir, you will some day come back with books.”⁸ When he got home, Wood e-mailed friends to ask for help in collecting children’s books and says he was overwhelmed with the response: “Over three thousand books arrived within two months.” The following year, he returned to Nepal, rented a team of six donkeys, and visited the village to deliver the books.

On that trip, he also made a decision to leave the corporate world, which he did in late 1999, to start Room to Read. His goal? To marry the business practices he had learned at Microsoft with his new mission to provide the lifelong gift of education to millions of children in the developing world. In his memoir, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, he explains, “Did it really matter how many copies of Windows we sold in Taiwan this month when there were millions of children without access to books?”⁹ With 750 million illiterate adults worldwide and 100 million children without access to school, he set out to build a nonprofit venture “with the scalability of Starbucks and the compassion of Mother Teresa.”¹⁰

Ask Wood about his biggest single challenge to date, and he responds:

There is no road map for what we are doing, so we’ve had to make a lot of it up as we went along. For example, there are virtually no children’s books in languages like Nepali and Khmer and Lao because the parents are too poor to afford them, so the publishers have no business case to publish. It’s a problem almost as old as the Himalayas, and until we get it right, millions of children will remain illiterate. So we’ve taken an entrepreneurial approach by recruiting and training local authors and artists. We now have dozens of local versions of Dr. Seuss working with us to create brightly colored and culturally relevant children’s books—over 150 to date, with an additional 100 being produced per year, in eleven languages.¹¹

Follow up with a question about what government and business leaders need to learn from the Room to Read experience, and he replies, “The state of today’s world demands that we help the citizen sector to scale at the same pace that blue-chip companies grow when they see market opportunities. It won’t do any good to throw billions of dollars at global poverty unless there is an efficient and scalable citizen sector that can deploy those funds. Until that happens, we will never make poverty history.”¹²

What the Room to Read story tells us, in part, is that one of the great assets in the new century is going to be the people with business experience who retire—and then find that they want to stay active, to get engaged, to create some sort of enduring legacy. Whereas early entrants no doubt felt like mutants, the success of the approaches pioneered by John Wood and others will assure future generations of entrepreneurs that they can make a real difference—so long as they think about (and build in) scalability from the outset.

Rory Stear and Freeplay Energy

Perhaps even more powerful than books is radio, the most widely used medium for mass communication in developing countries. In this space one of the most influential social entrepreneurs has been Rory Stear of Freeplay Energy. Stear, a serial entrepreneur, came across the original windup radio after his then business partner saw it on a BBC program. Stear secured the worldwide rights to the technology, developed it further to make it commercially viable, and adapted it for practical use under arduous rural conditions. He then set up Freeplay Energy in 1994 as a commercial, model 3 company. Among early investors were Anita and Gordon Roddick of the Body Shop International.

Since then, the company has developed patented windup technology, coupled with solar energy, for radios, flashlights, water purifiers, mobile phone chargers, medical instruments, and stand-alone power generators. In the process, Freeplay has increased the potential impact of ventures that focus on public health, education, and income generation for poor and rural communities, thereby helping eradicate poverty and improve quality of life.

Freeplay radios do not require grid-supply electricity or batteries: a few minutes of winding or some solar energy provide hours of listening. Since the company released its first product in 1996, more than four hundred thousand of its self-powered radios have been sent to sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the developing world, providing continuous access to information to more than 8 million people.

As of 2007, Freeplay had sold more than 5 million products worldwide. The largest markets by far are North America and Europe—particularly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when many Americans stocked up their emergency bunkers. Outdoor enthusiasts, environmentalists, emergency preparedness workers, and emergency response workers are also avid purchasers of Freeplay products.

The company has channeled the benefits of these high-volume sales in affluent markets to support product development for the less fortunate. In 1998, Stear established the Freeplay Foundation as part of this social agenda and brought Kristine Pearson on board as its founding executive director in early 1999. The foundation funded the development of the Lifeline radio, designed specifically for humanitarian and development use, and subsidizes the Lifeline’s purchase price for such markets. The Freeplay Foundation’s work is focused in Africa, where the high cost of batteries and low levels of electricity keep the poor from using radios to access basic information. Each Lifeline radio reaches a listening group of at least twenty people. The foundation also develops local partnerships with radio stations to help ensure that they broadcast appropriate content.

When asked to name the biggest challenge Freeplay has faced to date, Stear replies, “The whole Freeplay Energy project has been an extremely ambitious undertaking. Not only were we developing new technology from scratch, but we also were designing and implementing a highly unconventional hybrid business model, which included a separate, not-for-profit entity: the foundation. Balancing the realities of running a new, fast-growing commercial enterprise with supporting a hybrid not-for-profit contained a myriad of tensions, which needed to be carefully managed.”¹³ His greatest challenge for the next few years? “Now that both entities—the company and the autonomous Freeplay Foundation—are well established, the greatest challenge is turning the company into a broader-based, off-the-grid energy supplier and addressing both the opportunity and the obligation of providing access to power to the 35 percent of the world’s population that have none and the. . . 35 percent who have limited access.”

Finally, what makes Freeplay Energy and its foundation different from ordinary profit-making companies with their own charitable arms? “Freeplay has never seen the foundation as a charitable arm,” Stear says, “but rather as a stand-alone entity designed to address access-to-energy issues where the company can never go, which is basically providing access to energy to the ‘last billion’ people. We work in partnership with them—it is not a master-servant relationship between a donor and recipient.”

One key message here is that mainstream companies seeking to achieve leverage in their social and environmental programs have a range of entrepreneurial partners to choose from. The flip side, however, is that this is not like walking down a supermarket aisle and picking products off the shelf: these entrepreneurs have a very clear idea of the sort of corporate partners they want to work with, and they are prepared to invest the necessary effort to ensure a good strategic fit.

Gillian Caldwell and Witness

The step beyond radio is video in the service of human rights. While Freeplay Energy is a commercially viable, publicly traded enterprise, it is hard to imagine setting up a for-profit human rights campaigning organization. So, as executive director of Witness, a hybrid nonprofit organization based in New York, Gillian Caldwell spent her days helping others film shocking examples of human rights abuse.¹⁴ Involved in social justice work her entire life, she first recognized the value of powerful imagery as a young girl when she saw a painting by Leon Golub in her mother’s art gallery. “The picture showed a CIA-trained mercenary urinating on a political prisoner, bound and tied and lying on the floor,” she recalls. “His torturer stood over him, urinating, his back to the viewer. An accomplice turned his head around so that his gaze caught the viewer straight in the eye. Golub made everyone who looked at his paintings a ‘witness’ in the same way—and left them wondering what they were going to do in response.”¹⁵

Later, while working as an attorney with the civil rights movement, Caldwell took part in an undercover investigation of the Russian mafia’s involvement in trafficking women from the former Soviet Union into forced prostitution. From 1995 to 1998, as codirector of the Global Survival Network, she worked with Steve Galster as he posed as a buyer for a dummy company interested in importing women into the United States. Caldwell and Galster used hidden cameras to film transactions with the Russian mafia and eventually incorporated those images into the documentary Bought & Sold. Footage from the film was the subject of television programs on ABC News, the BBC, and CNN, and inspired a major story in the New York Times. This evidence helped convince President Clinton to issue an executive order allocating $10 million to fight violence against women, with an emphasis on trafficking, and also contributed to the UN’s passage of a transnational protocol designed to prevent trafficking. The U.S. Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protections Act in 2000.

The success of Bought & Sold prompted Witness to hire Caldwell as its executive director in 1998. The organization had been founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel, who took one of the early consumer handheld video cameras on a global tour with Amnesty International. Inspired by the activists he met, Gabriel came up with the idea of putting video cameras in their hands so they could capture evidence of abuses that governments could not cover up. Four years later, in the wake of the Rodney King beating by the Los Angeles police, Gabriel raised seed funding for Witness from the Reebok Human Rights Foundation, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now known as Human Rights First) agreed to house the program.

When Caldwell came on board as executive director, she realized that supplying cameras to activists was not enough. “I knew we couldn’t just drop off a camera and walk away,” she explains. “We had to help with every phase of the process, with training, distribution and the advocacy phase of each project.” Under her leadership, Witness began providing in-depth technical and tactical training to human rights groups and has partnered with groups in more than sixty countries. “The point is not just, ‘What’s the problem?’ but also‘What’s the solution?’ ” Caldwell explains.¹⁶

Ask her what her biggest challenge is going to be in the coming years, and she replies, “Staying evolutionary so that we can take advantage of rapid innovations of technology.” What can leaders in business and government learn from her work? “The most powerful and lasting solutions to the problems we face exist at a local level,” she insists. “Each and every one of us has the power to change the world, if we believe we can and have the right tools at our disposal.”¹⁷

The human rights agenda is evolving rapidly around the world. The combination of energetic campaigners like Gillian Caldwell and the latest digital imaging, recording, and communication technologies means that governments and businesses alike will be taken to task when they are directly or indirectly complicit in abuses. A key question for business leaders, therefore, will be whether to wait for such issues to erupt out of the blue—or to dive in, engage, learn, and help change things for the better. There may still be mishaps along the way, but in the end, sustainable markets are only built when people’s human and civil rights are respected as a matter of course.

Richard Jefferson and Cambia

We conclude this brief survey of efforts to democratize technology by looking at a field that would have seemed wildly futuristic to Gandhi: biological innovation. To simplify the task, let’s look over the shoulder of molecular biologist Richard Jefferson. A serial entrepreneur, Jefferson is on a crusade to free the tools of science from wildly broad patent rights held in obscure ways by a wide range of players whose primary interest is profit.

For thousands of years, Jefferson notes, biological innovation in agriculture was cooperative. By sharing the trial-and-error processes, farmers improved crop varieties and livestock. But the explosion in the power of science to improve agriculture, medicine, health, and environment in the past thirty years has been accompanied by a rush to lay claim to this knowledge by public- and private-sector scientists who have patented their developments, privatizing the tools that previously had been shared by all. As a result, the food and health industries have come to be dominated by large multinationals that target high-margin products and big markets. Consequently, advances in biotechnology are not being applied to poverty or hunger alleviation or eradication of neglected diseases that affect the poor, because the small profit margins and markets preclude the development of key innovations in these areas by small and medium-size enterprises.

As Jefferson explains:

Consider the wheel, perhaps a six-spoked wheel. In some ways, it is the most fundamental tool in society. It has countless uses unanticipated by its inventors; most were made by people who are not wheel-builders. The wheel is only useful when it does something, such as moving a cart; its economic value to society lies not in the price of the wheel, but in the wealth created through the use of the wheel. If it takes all six spokes for this wheel to turn, and each of these spokes is potentially different in some way, we have a good metaphor for a modern biological technology. Increasingly, biological technologies are not self-contained; rather they are interdependent technologies that require multiple key methods and components to function. If one spoke is withheld, no wheel is built. If one spoke is broken, the wheel will jam. And then the cart cannot move forward. By analogy, the most powerful technologies can be considered as “wheels,” requiring a number of “spokes” to function. For instance, the ability to transfer a gene to a crop plant may require dozens of individually patented, discrete technologies. Denial of access to any one of these “spokes” obstructs not only the use of the technology, but its improvement. Only when the core technology is in place, with full functionality, can it be subject to iterative and cooperative shaping to meet diverse users’ needs.¹⁸

To unlock the stranglehold on the tools of science and democratize advances in biotechnology, Jefferson founded Cambia, a hybrid, nonprofit, international research institute in Canberra, Australia. Cambia has become a global leader in the open source movement for the life sciences, providing practical services and tools including the Patent Lens information service to help innovators navigate through the huge, often confusing labyrinth of existing patents. Patent Lens collates and harmonizes data from several national and international patent offices. Cambia has created technological license platforms and templates, similar to open source licenses, through its Biological Open Source (BiOS) Initiative. Under these legally binding agreements, the new technology is available—royalty-free for further research or to create new products—to any party agreeing to freely share any improvements to the technology with other license holders, even if the improvement has been patented. This creates a dynamic, investment-secure environment for innovation on these platforms. And Jefferson is positioning his efforts to drive a broader approach toward open innovation in all realms of the life sciences.¹⁹

Multinational corporations (MNCs) claim it is the costs of researching and developing agricultural and medical products that drive their need to protect intellectual property. Yet, as Jefferson maintains, the open source approach to developing biotechnology allows for many to share the costs, dramatically changing the demographics of problem solving.²⁰

Jefferson is not against intellectual property rights guaranteed by copyright, patents, and other legislation. In fact, he holds the patents on a DNA-based molecular tool—the GUS reporter— that is one of the most widely used tools in biotechnology. The concerns he and other open source advocates have are about what kinds of scientific outcomes qualify for protection and how the exercise of intellectual property rights ends up blocking the access of other scientists and entrepreneurs to the tools needed for innovation. Jefferson feels that the norm this establishes alienates and excludes many creative problem solvers from using science as part of social enterprise.

The open source science movement has already attracted a diverse range of supporters, including governments, multinational corporations, large philanthropic organizations, and research and local science institutions. But as one can imagine, there may be others who view open source science with alarm. What happens if all these approaches create unexpected problems, such as new weed species or highly infectious agents? What happens if al-Qaeda or a similar organization adopts and adapts these technologies? Jefferson’s response is that the transparency and accountability afforded by open source approaches provide better protection against abuses than the more stealthy approaches favored by many companies and governments in particular.

What lessons can we draw from the cases in this chapter? First, social and environmental entrepreneurs need to build legitimacy for their ideas and approaches: it can take an enormous amount of energy to persuade others that what social entrepreneurs propose will transform ineffective and unjust systems and practices. Second, and closely related to the first, these entrepreneurs must find ways to gain access to political, corporate, and thought leaders who will embrace innovative approaches and then leverage those connections to drive wider implementation. And, third, such entrepreneurs also must work out how to attract sufficient—and sufficiently patient— capital to develop, test, refine, deploy, and scale their initiatives.

But, perhaps most fundamentally of all, if they are to achieve anything like their full potential, these entrepreneurs must work out how to change the system—a theme to which we now turn.