Rumi Shivaz Innovation Blog

Innovation Opportunity : Semi-Permanent Toilets

First of all, my heart goes out to everyone who lost a loved one, had serious injury or had their homes lost or damaged by the recent Christchurch earthquake. It can't be an easy time to get through. 

Nothing is permanent. I'm a great believer that the time you enter this world and the time you leave this world is pre-defined; so there is not a lot you can do to change it. We have to learn how to make the best out of the little time we got in-between these two events. 

While there is a lot of havoc and mayhem that happens as a result of a natural disaster, they also provide a vast number of opportunities for innovation. Watching the news clips and documentaries over the last 10 days about the severe shortage of Toilet facilities made me think of the following need.  

At the moment, what we have is either a permanent toilet (inside a building or public place) or a Port-a-Loo.  

The Port-a-Loo is not the ideal solution for a situation like Christchurch; since it is designed for a different purpose where the requirement is short-term (ie days) & low-usage rather than medium-term (ie weeks or months) with heavy usage. 

Rather than just importing Port-a-Loo's from China, we shoud use this opportunity to do some lateral thinking to find a better solution.

I would like to start an Innovation Challange to re-design a semi-permanent toilet to meet the constraints and demands of a Natural Disaster situation. It must be low-cost, can be assembled by the community using basic material & tools, can be plugged into the underground services (where available) etc. 

If you know of anyone who will be keen to help develop this idea further, then I would love to hear from them ASAP. This could be a great Social Innovation project not only for Christchurch, but for any other city around the world that could face a similar situation. 

 

 

Fast Track Ideas; Let go of Control

 

The last few weeks have been dedicated to eating my own dog food about getting ideas off the ground. 

Around September 2010, I realised that my innovation consulting practice can no longer be a 'Solo-Show'; to build the kind of company that I knew possible, I had to muster a great team around me. 

A lot of people worry about 'How' to get an idea off the ground.  In my view, the question to focus on is 'Who" are the right people you need to make the idea a huge success.  Once the "Who" question is answered, the "How" part will emerge. 

It took me a while gather a team who could see what I was talking about. Tim Brown from IDEO talks about T-Shaped People ... a group of people who have a broad set of complimentary skills and one deep area of Specialisation.  

Collaboration is easy to talk about but really hard to practice. Most ideas won't get off the ground because the Entrepreneur wants to keep full control of the implementation. By sharing this idea with my new team, I had to let go of control, and trust the collective intelligence of the team will transition the idea to a whole new level that I could not possibly have achieved on my own.  

I'm really proud of this team; It has got the right mix of Applied Research, Business Management & Entrepreneurship to tackle the kind of "Hard-To-Crack Problems" and "Hard-To-See Opportunities" that our clients will throw at us.  

During the last 8 weeks, we have managed to complete the first phase of this new enterprise; the most important items being Company Structure, Shareholder Agreement, Branding & Identity.  I'm really glad about deciding to use CrowdSPRING to find a company name & identity design.

The next phase is designing and market testing our service offerings. The link to the new company website is www.visionaro.com

Over the next three months, I'm looking forward to working with few selected customers for market validation and refining the Visionaro value proposition.