This article was taken from the May 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Satish Rai owns a small shop in the back streets of Mumbai. The sign above the <span class="s2">shop is written in Hindi and English: <span class="s3">Versatile <span class="s5">Technical <span class="s6">Institute
It's a pretty apt description. As well as selling phone cards andaccessories, Rai repairs mobile phones. He can repair anything. Your iPhone has been smashed? No problem; Rai will fix it. Reflash the software? Fine. But there is more to the institute than that.
For a fee of around 5,000 rupees -- a little over £50 -- Rai will train you to do the same for yourself. Each month he takes on a handful of new apprentices and, for a fraction of the cost of an academic degree, he trains them and readies them to set up their own business - and their own training institutes.
[pullquote source="Vinay Venkatraman, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design] "Five, six, seven years ago, these guys didn't exist," says Vinay Venkatraman of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, where he runs the [link url="http://ciid.dk/frugaldigital/"]Frugal Digital research group[/link"]Knowing what to subtract is a pretty valuable skill. It's really about the bare minimum you need to create what you want to achieve.[/pullquote]. "They have mushroomed in the last few years." As a designer and technologist, Venkatraman is wide-eyed with admiration for Rai, not just for his constant resourcefulness but for what he represents. "He's the next-generation digital entrepreneur."
Mobile-phone repair shops are a rapidly expanding economy throughout the developing world, bursting to life in the back streets of nations from Brazil to Burkina Faso.
They represent an informal, knowledge-transfer economy that's developing at giddying speed yet is largely outside the official economy. On the whole, they're small-scale, below-the-radar entrepreneurs rapidly learning new technologies -- and spreading that knowledge through a massive network of "institutes" like Rai's.
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Within days of a new device appearing on the market, tinkerers in Delhi or Bangkok will be taking it apart and deciphering which chip does what. Within weeks, cheaply printed manuals explaining the new technology will be widely on sale. Filled with photos and annotations, the publications enable anyone with just a few simple tools to fix the most advanced phones.
The lo-fi repair techniques are improvised and crowdsourced in Mumbai from a growing network of "repair wallahs". Want to know whether a particular chip is malfunctioning, but you can't afford a costly oscilloscope? Simple: spray foam on the chip and watch closely where the froth melts first. Check the pattern against the picture in the manual and bingo: a diagnosis.
Venkatraman believes that Rai and his fellow workers hold the key to transforming innovation in emerging economies. They also see this so-called "frugal" innovation having a wider impact: the methods used in the workshops of Manila and Mumbai will turn Western norms of production and design on their heads.
The frugal ethos aims to build products that, despite limited resources, solve a real local problem. What if the future is products that aren't insanely great, simply ones that are "good enough"?
Its roots lie in the late management guru CK Prahalad's concept of the "neglected billions". His 2004 article, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, cowritten by Stuart Hart, in the business journal Strategy+Business was scathing in its criticism of the attention paid by corporations to the moneyed middle classes: "The real source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging middle-income consumers," they wrote. "It is the billions of aspiring poor who are <span class="s4">joining the market economy for the first time."
Frugal innovation reaches the places other forms of innovation don't reach. For entrepreneurs this equals a massive market opportunity. For philanthropists it's also a chance to bring the world's poorest out of poverty. But, as Prahalad wrote, it requires corporations to rethink accepted values and to build new products.
This is already happening in the emerging economies. The Indian multinational Tata (which has interests in airlines, autos, steel, beverages and more) has been thinking frugally for a while: in 2004 it created a simple water purifier, the Sujal, which used discarded rice husks as part of its filtering mechanism. Working with the Harvard Business School, Indian company Godrej developed a £45 fridge, the ChotuKool, in 2009 for neighbourhoods with intermittent electricity. Created in India in 1968, the Jaipur leg is a remarkably simple, low-cost prosthetic foot made from polyurethane. Products will not reach billions at developed-world prices. But the principles of frugality go much deeper than cost-cutting; at its core this kind of innovation requires creativity.
Jugaad is Hindi for "an improvised arrangement". Navi Radjou, a business consultant and member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Design &
Innovation, is the co-author of the 2012 book Jugaad Innovation. "Jugaad innovation," Radjou says, "is creative improvisation in the face of adversity. So there's a creativity in play. It's not so much innovation as ingenuity."
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According to Radjou, adversity is one of the real drivers of frugal innovation. Radjou gives a favourite example: Kanak Das was a poor Indian who was sick of riding his bike over potholes. Rather than attempt to solve the problem of holes in the road, Das ingeniously modified his bicycle, adding a spring shock absorber that took energy from the seat post and converted it into forward motion. "This is a quintessential jugaad,"
Radjou says. "Because it's less about frugality, which is a by-product, than looking at adversity and saying, 'Could I turn this to my advantage?'"
Ingenuity allied to adversity sparks creativity. Lack of resources and challenging circumstances are key drivers. To use another popular term of the last few years, this is "constraint-based innovation". "Subtraction is an important part of construction," says Venkatraman. "And knowing what to subtract is a pretty valuable skill. It's really about the bare minimum you need to create what you want to achieve."
Certain products demonstrate the power ofsubtraction in product design. In 2007, GE Healthcare stripped down its cardiograph to its barest essentials.
At GE's John F Welch Technology Centre in Bangalore, the engineers designed a device that the company could market for around £1,000: a tenth of the cost of conventional cardiographs.
Another example is the solar bottle bulb. Fill a one-litre PET Coke bottle with a chlorine solution and insert it into a hole in the roof of your home. It's a cheap DIY light tube that the Liter of Light project, which originated at MIT, introduced to the Philippines. It's much cheaper, safer and environmentally less damaging than the kerosene that many Manila residents use to light the interior of their homes during daylight hours. The project has fitted 28,000 homes in the Manila area with the simple device: look across the shanty skylines and you can see the <span class="s2">bulbs poking out on a sea of galvanised zinc.
One type of subtraction is about taking something we already have and making a reduced version. The other involves subtracting resources entirely and relying on ingenuity. Eliodomestico is a solar-powered water filter that can purify up to five litres of saltwater. It was designed by Italian Gabriele Diamanti to be built from clay by local craft workers. In Japan the social enterprise Nippon Basic has developed the Cycloclean -- a bicycle that purifies water. Taking one of the greatest needs of poor communities and using a ubiquitous piece of technology -- the bike -- designers use pedal pressure to force water through a carbon filter, pumping up to six litres a minute.
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The Liter of Light project is not the only one to find an alternative to kerosene. After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin, Sam Goldman returned to the US in 2005. Having earned an MBA at Stanford, he launched d.light, a simple but robust solar-powered LED lamp. He estimates there are now more than 11 million people using them worldwide.
Last year British design-research practice Therefore produced a working prototype for a simple, LED-based alternative to kerosene lamps. The clever part of GravityLight is revealed by its name: it's powered by a weight. The user lifts a bag of rocks to give 30 minutes of light. When the company sought funding for the project through crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, they broke the $55,000 target by over 700 percent. A radio can be attached to its terminals. "We want to create other low-cost and low-energy devices," says Therefore's Jim Fullalove. "We're swimming against the tide of everything being more powerful and power-hungry."
Priya Mani, who heads the Frugal Digital project, is cautious. "How many schools have we visited where they've been given solar lanterns...?" she asks at the team's Copenhagen laboratory. "... And they're all dead," completes Venkatraman. "I can show you 50 different solar lanterns from 50 different NGOs," Mani continues, "and they're all just lying there." Mani began to notice defunct solar lanterns while on field trips and started photographing the debris. "Engineering-driven frugal innovation often fails because engineers don't pay attention to the local market," Radjou says. "Design thinking allows you to avoid the trap multinationals fall into, which is often about defeaturing an expensive solution to make it cheaper. The key [term] is market relevance. Because you can come up with a $100 laptop. It's frugal, it's affordable, but does it have any market relevance?"
Jane Chen and her colleagues at Embrace, a non-profit focused on healthcare, moved their operation from California to Bangalore in 2009 to achieve market relevance for their product. "Learning how to make things locally appropriate doesn't come from a couple of visits," says Chen. "It comes from living and breathing the environment it's intended for."
Embrace is one of the many social enterprises launched off the back of Stanford's multidisciplinary Design For Extreme Affordability course. Challenged to create a medical incubator at one percent of the cost of a traditional machine, Chen's team developed a mini baby sleeping bag that incorporates a phase-change material -- one that produces heat as it changes from one state to another -- keeping the bag at a constant temperature for up to six hours. The incubator works off-grid so it can be taken to remote locations where child-mortality rates remain high. After five years' research the product was launched in 2011 and is piloting in ten countries.
Chen recalls trialling the device with a mother from the Sargur tribal region of Karnataka in southern India. She had lost her first baby," says Chen, "and now she had a second low-weight baby that was immediately put into our product and kept there for about a week. Women there are labelled as worthless if they lose their babies. You could see this woman's confidence coming back as the baby got healthier. That was really remarkable."
In other words, designing for the emerging markets is a very different thing from designing with them.
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As Satish Rai and his repair wallahs demonstrate, with 61 percent of the world now having access to a mobile, these devices are the most significant bottom-of-the-pyramid technology, transforming developing economies in ways that NGOs dream of. As Rachel Kyte, vice president for sustainable development for the World Bank says: "Mobile communications offer major opportunities to advance human and economic development - giving access to health information, making cash payments, spurring job creation and stimulating involvement in democratic processes."
Focusing on lean, "good enough", "constraint-based" innovation, Africa's entrepreneurs are working to exploit the continent's potential. In Nigeria, former Microsoft employee Femi Akinde was frustrated by his inability to purchase an airline ticket in Lagos with his smartphone. Why weren't Nigerian businesses investing in ecommerce? He discovered that many regarded the cost of the initial investment as too risky. Akinde responded by creating an ultra-cheap mobile ecommerce platform, Mobiashara, which is based on the least sophisticated technology, SMS. "It was the only way you could reach everyone," Akinde says. "It allows people <span class="s4">to get their products online for pennies."<span class="s3">
[pullquote source="KeepInline]
Shivani Siroya has found another use for SMS. A former Unicef worker, she realised that if small businesses in emerging economies were going to progress beyond the level of microfinance, they'd need good financial records in order to establish solid credit records. So she built a team to create an SMS-based accounting system, [link url="http://insightsms.com/"]InSight[/link], which works on any phone, launching it in 2010 with pilot projects in Mexico, Ghana, Mali and India. Today, three major Indian banks accept InSight scores from more than 4,000 users.
Three years ago Swaziland-raised former McKinsey
& Co consultant Vahid Monadjem spotted an opportunity in South Africa in the way people buy prepaid cards for mobiles. These cards change hands many times, sometimes travelling thousands of miles across the country before they are redeemed. "If we can allow people to get their services direct from national service providers," Monadjem says, "they can deliver their services more cheaply."
[image id="XXW47qK4Mj1"]
His team have put together what they call "a business in a box": a simple SMS-driven electronic point-of-sale device that prints out a code that is redeemed for phone minutes. Nomanini is a social enterprise that aims to add muscle to Africa's entrepreneurial layer of minibus drivers and small-shop owners by giving them a cheap, affordable service they can sell, delivered through a small, portable orange device with simple, coloured buttons.
The torrent of low-cost and easy-to-use devices starting to pour from the emerging economies suggests that locally generated solutions are the most effective and sustainable -- and potentially the most lucrative.
Vinay VeNkatraman didn't used to be so interested in sustainability. Seven years ago he was working in more conventional design in Milan, the city that he says is "all about making nicer chairs". "I thought design was all about the appeal of things," he says. "Somewhere along the way, the social reality of it started to dawn on me."
[GalleryThumbnails"]We're on the verge of a digital cottage industry that matches local needs to local resourcefulness.[/pullquote]
Invited to Denmark to set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design Venkatraman became an evangelist about how design could contribute more profoundly to social change. Similarly, Priya Mani was in the country of her birth visiting an old family friend who worked in a maternity unit in Andhra Pradesh. An enduring problem at the health facility was monitoring pregnant women, who often lived in remote villages.
While there is a system of volunteer health workers who visit the women, there is neither the budget to give them expensive equipment -- nor the will. "You have to consider the local power dynamics. If you give these people expensive devices it means a shift of power,"
Mani says. A significant proportion of the cost of medical devices is producing and maintaining their accuracy. But what if you take the frugal approach and make devices that are cheaper but not as accurate? Frugal Digital's Clock Sense is a simple device that measures the amount of haemoglobin in the blood -- a lo-fi pulse oximeter. Using two LEDs and a simple light sensor, "components you can pull out of a TV remote", Venkatraman says, the device can in a matter of seconds provide a very simple reading of the overall health of a patient.
But it's not a diagnostic tool. It's a simple screening device. "It's about reducing the bottleneck in healthcare," Mani says. Attached by using a USB, the oximeter can be replaced by any other type of sensor, such as a temperature-gauge pad.
The handheld reader is a hacked alarm clock. The dial has just three readings. Green if you're fine. Amber if you need a check-up. Red means you need to get to a hospital fast. Simple. This is equipment designed for the low-level health worker, the people on the ground treating patients. And it doesn't threaten the professional status of the nurse or doctor back at the clinic.
This is where local codesign is crucial, as Jane Chen discovered in India with Embrace. Like Mani, she learned that making the information on a device appear too accurate is not inevitably a good thing. "The women I meet often say we don't trust Western medicine," Chen says. "If you give me X amount of drugs to take, I'll halve it. If you tell me to keep a child's temperature at 37 degrees celsius, I'll think that's too warm." This insight led the Embrace team to remove the digital temperature read-out on their baby warmer and replace it with a simple liquid crystal colour display.
Frugal innovation means accepting the importance of such codesign from the earliest stage. Which also means that you have to accept that your design may change radically early on. Venkatraman gives the example of the hearing aid Frugal Digital set out to design. The first thing they learned was that hearing aids were complex devices. Not all medical products have a one per cent cost solution. The second was that the shortfall in diagnosis of hearing loss was a far bigger problem.
In India, NGOs set up camp in rural areas to attempt mass screening programmes. Venkatraman and Mani visited one in rural Maharashtra -- a big van full of equipment. "Each test took about 45 minutes and used a huge amount of electricity," Venkatraman says. "Which means that if the electricity went out, you'd be sitting in the hot sun waiting for the electricity to come back."
The solution was to cut the length of the queue with a no-fuss test and a device that costs only a few pounds to manufacture. This was Osha -- the open-source hearing aid project. First, a diagnostic app running on a smartphone with a hacked audio port, lets users produce simple feedback tones suitable for hearing tests. Venkatraman and his colleagues also created a cheap (albeit bulky) low-energy hearing aid that costs around only £30 to make, and which can be paired with an Android phone.
To the team's surprise, the hacked device is only marginally less accurate than conventional professional devices that retail for £2,400. Even as a screening device, it would prove its worth. "The difference between being able to screen in five minutes and 40 minutes is phenomenal." It doesn't need to be hooked up to a generator to work and can send the data via SMS to wherever it's needed.
It's not the only device that Frugal Digital has developed by hacking mobile devices: it has also used a 3G mobile phone to create a simple, portable, battery-powered projector for use in remote schools. Plug in a memory stick with teaching materials to the USB in FD's Darshana and you've got a cheap, durable audiovisual teaching aid. This is a common thread to Frugal Digital's devices: the components aren't just cheap, they're hackable.
FD's ultra-frugal approach is simple. And this is where FD's real mission lies: what if the mobile repair shops could be used to build, maintain and fix new digital tools? Or even to conceive and innovate them? Venkatraman believes we're on the verge of what he calls "a digital cottage industry" that matches local needs to local resourcefulness.
During a research trip in Mumbai, Venkatraman and Mani went to visit the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, the prestigious technology university, to view its supercomputer. There was a big wait, during which they walked past a lab with around 40 oscilloscopes. The room was empty.
But across the road, there was a training shop similar to Rai's. It was packed with students, all learning informally. Venkatraman believes that, at that moment, he saw the future. Which is why he's designing the kind of frugal devices that those in the shop will one day be making. "I would love to see hundreds of new products coming out of this informal economy," says Mani. "A whole new generation of repair wallahs."
William Shaw wrote about 4G in 10.11. His novel A Song From Dead Lips is published in August
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
