[MUSIC]
We've talked a little bit about the importance of prototyping during
the entrepreneurial process.
You cannot spend years and years writing white papers doing research.
At some point, you actually have to try to put together a real life
version of what it is you're working on.
Here, I want to show you the prototype process of Carlson Coco.
When Coco started to get into this challenge of developing a water pump,
she started to develop a bunch of different ideas about
what this water pump could look like.
She did do some sketches and drawings, but
she also sat down and said what would this actually look like?
So she took household goods that she could find laying around,
cardboard, some tubes, some pieces of wood and
she developed a small workable prototype that would allow her to test out
the model that she was developing, this foot operated model of a water pump.
What's important here is that Coco does not spend years or
imparts on the Internet waiting for them to arrive,
trying to build an actual perfect first version, she is going quick and dirty.
She's trying to look up very quickly what this would look like and
then enact it in reality, trying to put it into reality very quickly.
And I think that's the essence of a good prototype.
A prototype is quick, it's fast, it's inexpensive, and
it allows you to see your ideas in real time.
Now Carlos is working on a big problem,
which is how do we bring electricity to villages?
And he's got this idea for
a power plant that would use a band of soy husk as his input and
turn that actual input into energy through gasification and
electricity at the end of the process.
So what he's thinking about are three different prototypes.
And one is a system where you would walk up to the top of the gasifying
generator and dump in the product, which is the model he saw in India.
He also thought about a conveyor belt.
And so he thought, what if I could develop a quick and
easy model that would convey the soy husk to the top of the funne?
And then he also tested out and thought about the idea of using
heavy equipment to move larger amounts of material faster.
At the end of the day, critical question for him is how deep and
how complex should this first attempt at electrification become?
And he came to the conclusion that it's better to start simple.
And he liked the first model, the walk up manual model.
But he only can do this if he starts with a prototype.
He starts by building a sample generator, seeing if it works and
then thinking about and trying out other alternative techniques.
So prototyping is a critical step for social entrepreneurs.
It's the moment where you go beyond the plan and you go into reality, and
you say this is what the project would actually look like.
And will it work, and what can I learn from this process of trying it,
rather than just dreaming about it?
In our lectures, we talked in depth about logic models, but
I thought it'd be useful to show you the logic models that Carlos and
Coco have created for their enterprises.
Let's take a quick first look at Coco's logic model.
What she's done here, in very graphic and
creative form, is set out the key factors at all five levels, the inputs,
the activities, the outputs, the outcome and the impact that she's going after.
A key takeaway is, logic models could be enormously complex, but
what Coco has done is try to strip it down and simplify it.
Now if we look at Carlos' logic model, we'd see something also very interesting,
which is his is a complex enterprise with a lot of different possibilities
in terms of what could go into a logic model.
But what he's done is he's said, no I'm going to focus just on getting this to
the point where I can communicate clearly with others on what I'm trying to do.
And to that end, he's made his impact claim very streamlined.
He's cut out a lot of possible other words that could go in this.
And what I like about his logic model is it is stripped down just like Coco's but
it's also very, very clear and compact.
So constructing a logic model is a complex challenge, but both Carlos and
Coco succeeded in simplifying down their ideas into a single image that
others can understand, that drives from left to right, from inputs,
activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact.
It takes the reader through the entire value chain and
explains what it is they're going to do.
[MUSIC]