We continue the chapter with a video that will attempt to explain how to generate ideas in order to spell out your social mission. At present, you perhaps have a broad idea for your social mission. Now the challenge is to hone that mission until you have an actual prototype for an idea, a real first outline of an idea. Before suggesting a simple approach for arriving at your first prototype, let me put your mind at rest by
telling you that good ideas do not come out of nowhere and need to be worked
on over time. Even those people nowadays considered to be geniuses started by thinking long and hard. Hitting on a good idea, an idea that will really allow you to meet a need and fulfil your social mission is ultimately a step-by-step process. There are many methods for generating ideas that will refine your social mission. Later on in this MOOC, for example, you will find a video on design thinking. All of these methods ultimately aim to help you ask the right questions then find the right answers. Have a listen to Chris Delepierre, one of the Ticket for Change 2014 participants, who gives an excellent explanation of this stage of refining a broad mission and the key thing is to find correct answers to the relevant questions. Then, I will suggest a simple approach for arriving at the initial prototype for your idea. I came along with an initial idea that was quite broad, which was to promote the cultural heritage of my region through 3D modeling and printing around the world, and to be sure, talking with players, entrepreneurs, surely forced me to ask questions that I hadn't confronted initially, and so that enabled me to clarify, let's say, what I was thinking, but it surely enabled, let's say, various details to develop... who are my customers and in what usage context could my business be undertaken. And so there you go, it was a relevant question, I think, with respect to my original idea. Now, here is a simple approach that asks 3 key questions in order to hone the definition of your social mission. Even if you start with my simple approach, I strongly advise you to think of it as a starting point, an initial avenue to explore. Go and take a look at other methods for generating your prototype. The approach that I suggest is called "what?, who for?, how?". The first stage to our approach is to answer the question of what. To answer this question, there are two factors that are important. The first factor is the field in which you will be working. Perhaps you have already chosen the field of social integration, equal opportunities, poverty reduction or some other field. The second detail is the territory. Do you see your project running in the suburbs of Paris, in a particular country, across a whole continent, or do you want to have an impact world wide? It is really important to ask this question: what is the potential for my idea, how far do I want to push it and how ambitious do I want to be. Let us return to the example of
Dialogue in the Dark. In their case, the answer to the question of "what" is the integration of disabled people internationally. The question of "who" comes next: who is it for? To answer this question, there is an important distinction to be made, namely between the client and the beneficiary. The client is the person that pays for your product or service; the beneficiary is the person who benefits from the existence of the products or services offered as part of your social mission. These are not necessarily one and the same people. For the purposes of our chapter, we need to differentiate between
2 cases. Either we have clients who are also the beneficiaries of our service or product, or else we work on behalf of the beneficiaries, who are not clients. In the classical example of micro-lending, generally speaking, the clients are also the beneficiaries. I am talking about the poor who benefit from the micro-credit lent: they are the beneficiaries. At the same time, they are also responsible for paying interest on their loan. The beneficiaries are therefore also a micro-lending bank's customers. Here, customer equals beneficiary. The example of Dialogue in the Dark illustrates the second case. The blind people working in the restaurants are not the customers. The customers are people like me who come to the restaurants and pay for their meals. So we have the blind employees who are the beneficiaries on the one hand and the customers who pay for the meals on the other. Now I invite you to take part in a little quiz. In the case of Babyloan, the example from the first video, do you think the beneficiaries are also the customers? The answer is no. Whereas in the case of conventional micro-lending, the customers are indeed also the beneficiaries, they receive micro-loans as beneficiaries and are also the customers, because they pay the interest. In the case of Babyloan, the innovation is that the beneficiary does not pay any interest. The interest is paid by the people making the loans on the crowdfunding platform. They become Babyloan's customers. It may well be that you are working on an idea where the beneficiaries are not the same people as the customers. You will see how the business model for a project can vary in accordance with the 2 scenarios in chapter 5. Now, on the basis of the previous two questions, you can work on the question of how. This means giving a precise description of your product or service, what makes it a unique product. Very often, successful entrepreneurs of change are those who offer an innovative product or service. The advantage they have over other companies therefore often lies in the answer to the question of "how?". For example, such entrepreneurs may have an innovative technique, or they may have key partners to support them or unique skills that they have developed. If you take the example of Dialogue in the Dark, they have innovated around the question of how. Their innovation is a restaurant service in total darkness, with blind staff with the skills to work in this environment. So to recap, it is very important to answer the 3 basic questions: what, who for, how. Starting with these key questions, you can draw up the initial prototype for your idea. Here is how Babyloan answered these questions and how you could sum up their prototype. When it comes to 'what', the aim is to reduce poverty around the world through a process of economic development. When it comes to 'who', the answer is small entrepreneurs throughout
the world. And finally in terms of 'how', a crowdfunding platform is used to grant micro-loans. You can see that the answers to the questions 'what' and 'who for' are not necessarily innovative. Babyloan does almost the same as the bank [...]. However, the idea of offering micro-loans via an on-line crowdfunding platform is what is truly innovative, vastly increasing the funds available for loans and at the same time, allowing the beneficiaries, poor citizens, to receive loans without paying interest. To end this video, I suggest that you answer the 3 basic questions for developing the initial prototype for your idea. Our approach-- what, who for, why-- is a simple one but I hope it will help you to hone the definition of your social mission and quickly arrive at an initial prototype. Be warned: it is not at all easy to draw up a prototype for an innovative idea and you must appreciate that it is something that is achieved
step by step. In particular, you need a great deal of feedback, as I will explain in the third part of this chapter.
