when cheaper might not be the best answer

"Purpose is the place where your deep gladness meets the world's needs."
- Frederick Buechner on Social Transformation

If purpose of social innovation is to provide endearing value to all stakeholders of an inclusive society, we need to understand the narrative of what we mean by endearing value. I reckon we need to progress from seeing value as a mere function of affordability. We need to progress from simply making products and services emanating from sustainable innovations compete on price point (read:cheaper). We need to connect and respond to what potential adopters and patrons may perceive as endearing value.

Social innovation needs to respond to the challenges of love, inspiration, beauty, trust and excitement - necessary elements to capture the mind-share of billions (can we make everyone say: I am absolutely loving it!).

The concept of endearing value should be more than the cost imperat... Often we tend to bring social innovations in the developing world simply believing that consumption or adoption of any social innovation will happen if we could make things simply affordable without paying much attention to the concept of endearing value: unaffordable products or services often raises aspirational value we crave for. And that makes affordable products more prone to scrutiny - the reason why some of the innovations we thought were positively radical might run the danger of failing to get adopted in the longer run.

Value is often associated with context and character of the innovation. In a country mired in poth***s, where traffic management systems are not exactly ideal and where driving is fraught with danger (read: West Bengal), often people would associate endearing value foremost with road safety when they think of a car. So I reckon compact car 'nano' from the Tata group may ultimately find few takers among the urban poor of West Bengal - a once prominent state in eastern India which has a lot of 'catch up' to do with the economically progressive Indian states of Gujarat or Maharashtra for instance.

Limited or scarcity of resources synonymous with the 'bottom of the pyramid' within the automobile sector may actually seek more value from what they buy or what they adopt. Usually post purchase dissonance is very high for those with limited resources. So we might need to think about the context in which we are trying to bring about our innovative product or service to the ma****.

A connected approach based on design led thinking might be able to deal with the innovation challenge emanating from the natural disconnect between mass affordability and high quality. There may be more than one answer how we can re-balance our short term priorities often based on cost leadership and our long term aspiration of being able to command loyalty beyond reason. If we at least recognize that we need to focus our innovation inertia to address this phenomena, we may somewhat succeed to understand the dynamics of adoption better.

All those inspired to meet the challenge of social innovation must look for value creation holistically to connect and build an ecosystem of support, endorsement and adoption. Social innovation manifested in the form of any social entrepreneurship need to be a viable economic proposition. Such viability will be contingent upon adoption by its target customers. In most instances, they are looking for something beyond just affordable. I bet they are looking for a connection.