World Ark Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 32) 2 3 4 5 67 4 5 Think big and act big. If you learn about a problem in its real-life context from the people who have the problem, ask basic questions and open your eyes to see the obvious, you are likely to come up with big ideas with world-changing potential. There are a billion people in the world who need eyeglasses but don’t have them. A potential solution is to provide access to display stands from which people could pick $2 spectacles that correct their vision problems. When most people think of implementing a solution like this, they think small. There are several organizations that have started to provide affordable reading glasses to poor people, but all of them together have delivered less than a half million eyeglasses, which serves less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the customers who need them. I start by thinking about how to reach half of the total potential market within 15 years. A business plan to accomplish this would probably need to reach global sales of $50 million a year within five years, purchasing 50-cent eyeglasses from mainland China a million or more at a time and selling them at a retail price of about $2. I would spend most of my time designing an effective global marketing-and-distribution plan for both rural and urban areas, and wrap it up with a clear statement of the start-up capital required to implement a threeyear plan, how it would be spent, and what it would accomplish. This kind of planning is routine for large businesses or for any entrepreneur seeking start-up venture capital, but it is rare for development organizations. Thinking big in this way always carries the risk that you will fail in a big way. But if you can’t stand to take the risk of failing and looking bad while doing so, you probably should be in a different line of work. 32 March/April 2008 | WORLD ARK think act Think like a child. There is a simple and direct curiosity in childhood and a love of play that we tend to miss badly in our approach to problem-solving as adults. If you think like a child, you can quickly strip a problem down to its basic elements. In 1996 I was in Cachoeira, an Amazon rain-forest village, trying to figure out how rubbertappers could dry Brazil nuts at the village gathering point so they could increase their income. We had to design a village drier to replace the large industrial driers of big-city plants. When we walked through the villages, I saw that every second house had a forno de farinha, a two-foot-high baked-clay furnace with an eight-by-ten-foot stove top used to dry manioc flour. When I saw all these ovens used to dry manioc, I realized that each of them could also become a Brazil nut drier. We just needed to think like children instead of engineers. So we built a removable wooden house with a chimney that sat on top of the manioc-drying oven, and used the heat coming from the stove top to draw air over the surface of Brazil nuts that were drying on wire-mesh drawers inside the wooden house. We built the first one from scratch in two hours. www.heifer.org http://www.heifer.org
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