Including poor people's ideas in innovation - an interview with Anil Gupta, founder of Honey Bee networks

"I realised that my conduct was not different from anybody elses. I could not really show how income from my company linked to direct benefits for poor people. I also wondered how people could learn from each other, especially here [in India] we need to get knowledge out in so many different languages, to not just benefit a few."

For a long time, I have been looking forward to meeting the man in front of me - a "guru" within social entrepreneurship, a man who has proven over the past 40 years how poor people and "common" people's ideas can become sources of innovation. He has set up a method to attribute the IPR to the originator, regardless if this person is located in a remote area or cannot read or write. Anil Gupta explains why he set up Honey Bee Network, which is a network intended to publish local ideas and knowledge that can be used for new products and services. It leads into a discussion about what happens when profits are derived from local or traditional knowledge, how does one make sure that co-creation is also for the benefit of those who contribute. In particular when those driving the development intend to make a profit. Gupta introduced a simple, but also quite challenging way, to deal with this. He travels around the countryside of India a couple of times per year, often together with a group of students.

"We do learning walks a couple of times per year, when we walk from village to village and go to people's doors to discuss ideas. We ask them how they solve particular problems. There will ALWAYS be somebody who has an idea how to solve a problem and perhaps have done a simple solution. We then capture that idea and when we get back home we develop a prototype, which we then can take back and put into testing. This is a way to link formal and informal science."

This has resulted in 550 patents to date and the ideator always get part of the patent assigned to him or her.These patents are turned into "Technology Commons", similar to the open source tools that I described in the Spotlight about Innovation in inclusive business. (Click link to download). Copying is not prevented, it is encouraged, as long as the ideator or creator gets an attribute in the final work. Another source of underutilized groups in society are students, he believes. At smaller Indian universities it is quite common that students are tasked to solve problems of SMEs. Gupta resonates many thinkers in the Ghandi tradition of believing in the power of villages and "smallness":

"I think solutions will mainly come from smaller places, because the fear of failure is less pronounced. At the big universities they will all want a job within a large corporate, but the student at small colleges will face much more competition to get that same job, so they really have to prove themselves."

As a proof of this he points to a recent initiative, Techpedia.in, which is the work of students listing innovations and solutions, which students have been part of solving. Within a year a small team of students have listed 100,000 new ideas.

"You can take this and extend it to Sweden!", Anil suggests with a big smile towards me and Johan Åkerblom from Sida, who is listening.

Anil Gupta also worked with the government to develop the national innovation strategy for India, which is the reason we meet at the Global Innovation Roundtable, to which Innovations Against Poverty was invited. He speaks proudly of the innovation strategy.

"It is the only system in the world to capture common people's ideas. We set up several innovation labs at universities and a National Micro Venture Innovation Fund to sustain them."

The fund does not provide any financial support though, and seed money is scarce everywhere in India. Anil Gupta's vision is a shared economy - where we generously share ideas and knowledge across the world. For that to happen working with grass-root innovation is not sufficient, he realises. He is now ready to take on the big guys.

"We are approaching the big corporates now. We will show them that it is often possible to find solutions at the fraction of the cost of some of the large R&D dependent companies."

If you wish to hear more from Anil Gupta directly, you can watch his TED talk from 2009.