BIF team writing week: The Prologue

The Business Innovation Facility: Four years (almost), five countries, 104 projects – and one week to get our collective heads around the insights, experiences, challenges, solutions and lessons that have come out of this pilot programme.

Last week, the BIF country managers and members of the UK team who have been working on the ground with companies, spent five days together capturing these insights and working with each other to explore the major themes that had emerged in the course of the programme. They shared the stories of ‘their’ projects, discussed the challenges, considered the solutions and, looking at the portfolio as a whole, drew out as many findings and conclusions as they could.

To make the task more manageable each team member took on one ‘theme’ to explore it in more detail. These included:

• what innovation really means in inclusive business
• the challenges of creating demand for new products
• the role of partnerships
• why (and what happens when) things don’t quite go to plan
• what does ‘scale’ mean in inclusive business? – and how are our projects doing?
• what do we now know about agribusiness models?
• commercial returns – what are we seeing?
• will the BIF projects have a systemic impact?

As I had the good fortune to dip in and out of these many discussions, I started to hear some similar conversations taking place and, by the end of the week, my notes started to take some kind of shape. I’m not sure if this shape is a ven diagram, a large circle or lots of links in a chain, but a pattern was definitely emerging.

It seems you can’t talk about innovation without worrying about whether a new product will be accepted by the consumer –so how do you create demand in new markets? In order to reach these consumers at the base of the pyramid (to understand their needs and get the products to them) you need to access them – and you might need the skills, networks and resources of new and unusual partners to do this effectively. But what if you don’t choose the right partner or you can’t make the partnership work? Will your plans need to be changed, or even scrapped? Will this mean the venture might not reach scale? Or is scale really about finding new and innovative ways to market your service or product?....you can see where I’m going with this.

These issues are interlinked and as a whole they make up the BIF story. But without understanding each element – or chapter – the story does not flow. So, in order to tell the story properly, our experienced and dedicated team will spend the coming months finessing our findings and shaping our conclusions. We will then share them as broadly as possible to inform, encourage and equip those working to develop viable businesses that have a positive impact on the poor.

In the meantime, initial thoughts and findings from the week have been captured in a selection of blogs (links above - and outlined in more detail by Caroline Ashley). Your comments and thoughts on these blogs are encouraged. Do help us create as full and honest an account of the BIF programme as possible.

Click to read more blogs from the BIF team's lesson-learning and writing week!